“What I want is to Go,” Staunt would reply. But he could not tell Bollinger how long it would actually be before he would find himself ready to take his leave.
There seemed to be some pattern in this thrice-weekly pas de deux of conversation with his Guide. Bollinger appeared to be maneuvering him patiently and circuitously toward some sort of apocalyptic burst of joyful insight, a radiant moment of comprehension in which he would be able to say, feeling worthy of Hallam as he did, “Now I shall Go.” But the maneuvers did not seem successful. Often, Staunt came away from Bollinger confused and depressed, less certain than ever of his desire to Go.
By the fourth week, most of his time was being given over to reading. Music had largely palled for him. His family, having made the obligatory first round of visits, had stopped coming; they would not return to the House of Leavetaking until word reached them that he was in the final phase of his Going and ready for his Farewell ceremony. He had said all he cared to say to his friends. The recreation center bored him and the company of the other Departing Ones chilled him. Therefore he read. At the outset, he went about it dutifully, mechanically, taking it up solely as a chore for the improvement of his mind in its final hours. Like an old pharaoh trying to repair his looks before he must be delivered into the hands of the mummifiers, Staunt meant to polish his soul with philosophy while he still had the chance. It was in that spirit that he plodded through Hobbes, whose political ideas had set him ablaze when he was nineteen, and who merely seemed crabbed and sour now. It may seem strange to some man, that has not well weighed these things; that nature should thus dissociate, and render men apt to invade, and destroy one another: and he may therefore, not trusting to this inference, made from the passions, desire perhaps to have the same confirmed by experience. Let him therefore consider with himself:, when taking a journey, he arms himself, and seeks to go well accompanied; when going to sleep, he locks his doors; when even in his house he locks his chests; and this when he knows there be laws, and public officers, armed, to revenge all injuries shall be done him; what opinion he has of his fellow-subjects, when he rides armed; of his fellow citizens, when he locks his doors; and of his children, and servants, when he locks his chests. Does he not there as much accuse mankind by his actions, as I do by my words? Growing up in a tense, bleak world of peace that was really war, Staunt had found it easy to accept Hobbes’ dark teachings. Now he was not so sure that the natural condition of mankind was a state of conflict, every man at war with every other man. Something had changed in the world, it seemed. Or in Staunt. He put Hobbes away in displeasure.
He was almost afraid to turn to Montaigne, fearing that that other great guide of his youth might also have soured over the long decades. But no. Instantly the old charm claimed him. I cannot accept the way in which we fix the span of our lives. I have observed that the sages hold it to be much shorter than is commonly supposed. “What!” said the younger Cato to those who would prevent him from killing himself, “am I now of an age to be reproached with yielding up my life too soon?” And yet he was but forty-eight years of age. He thought that age very ripe and well advanced, considering how few men reach it. Yes. Yes. And: Wherever your life ends, it is all there. The profit of life is not in its length but in the use we put it to: many a man has lived long, who has lived little; see to it as long as you are here. It lies in your will, not in the number of years, to make the best of life. Did you think never to arrive at a place you were incessantly making for? Yet there is no road but has an end. And if society is any comfort to you, is not the world going the selfsame way as you? Yes. Perfect. Staunt read deep into the night, and sent for a bottle of Chateau d’Yquem from the House of Leavetaking’s well-stocked cellars, and solemnly toasted old Montaigne in his own sleek wine, and read on until morning. There is no road but has an end.
When he was done with Montaigne, he turned to Ben Jonson, first the familiar works, Volpone and The Silent Woman and The Case is Altered, then the black, explosive plays of later years, Bartholomew Fair and The New Inn and The Devil Is an Ass. Staunt had always felt a strong affinity for the Elizabethans, and particularly for Jonson, that crackling, hissing, scintillating man, whose stormy, sprawling plays blazed with a nightmarish intensity that Shakespeare, the greater poet, seemed to lack. As he had always vowed he would, Staunt submerged himself in Jonson, until the sound and rhythm of Jonson’s verse echoed and reechoed like thunder in his overloaded brain, and the texture of Jonson’s mind seemed inlaid on his own. The Magnetic Lady, Cynthia’s Revels, Catiline his Conspiracy—no play was too obscure, too hermetic, for Staunt in his gluttony. And one afternoon during this period he found himself doing an unexpected thing. From his data terminal he requested a print-out of the final pages of The New Inn’s first act, with an inch of blank space between each line. At the top of the sheet he wrote carefully, The New Inn, an Opera by Henry Staunt, from the play of Ben Jonson. Then, turning to Lovel’s long speech, “O thereon hangs a history, mine host,” Staunt began to pencil musical notations beneath the words, idly at first, then with sudden earnest fervor as the proper contours of the vocal line suggested themselves to him. Within minutes he had turned the entire speech into an aria and had. even scribbled some preliminary marginal notes to himself about orchestration. The style of the music was strange to him, a spare, lean, angular sort of melodiousness, thorny and complex, with a curiously archaic flavor. It was the sort of music Alban Berg might have written during an extended visit to the early seventeenth century. It did not sound much like Staunt’s own kind of thing. My late style, he thought. Probably the aria was impossible to sing. No matter: this was how the muse had called it forth. It was the first sustained composing Staunt had done in years. He stared at the completed aria in wonder, astonished that music could still flow from him like that, welling up without conscious command from the gushing spring within.
For an instant he was tempted to feed what he had written into a synthesizer and get back a rough orchestration. To hear the sound of it, with the baritone riding tensely over the swooping strings, might carry him on to set down the next page of the score, and the next, and the next. He resisted. The world already had enough operas that no one listened to. Shaking his head, smiling sadly, he dated the page, initialed it in his customary way, jotted down an opus number—by guesswork, for he was far from his ledgers—and, folding the sheet, put it away among his papers. Yet the music went on unfolding in his mind.
Nine
In his ninth week at the House of Fulfillment, finding himself stranded in stagnant waters, Staunt sought Dr. James and applied for the memory-jolt treatment. It seemed to be the only option left, short of Going, and he rarely contemplated Going these days. He was done with Jonson, and the impulse to request other books had not come to him; he peeked occasionally at his single page of The New Inn, but did not resume work on it; he was guarded and aloof in his conversations with Bollinger and with his occasional visitors; he realized that he was sliding imperceptibly into a deathlike passivity, without actually coming closer to his exit. He would not return to his former life, and he could not yet surrender and Go. Possibly the memory jolt would nudge him off dead center.