She could only manage a puny, ‘Yes, I suppose,’ but he appeared satisfied with her answer.
Donnell’s new independence allowed Jocundra to cultivate her distance. Though the cameras continued to break down - ‘Like some damn bug’s in the wires,’ said the maintenance man - the orderlies kept track of his comings and goings, and each morning she put on shorts and a T-shirt, took a blanket and found a sunny spot in which to pass the day. She pored over graduate school catalogs, thinking she might go after her doctorate at Michigan or Chicago, or maybe Berkeley. Within a couple of years she could be doing her field work. Africa. Thatched huts on a dusty plain, baobab trees and secretary birds, oracular sacrifices and tattooing rituals, great fireball sunrises, the green mountains still full of gorillas and orchids and secret kingdoms. Each noon she could almost believe that Shadows was the seat of a lost African empire or some empty Eden; the grounds were deserted, the only sounds were those of insects and birds, and the sunlight hung in gauzy shafts straight down through the canopy, as if huge golden angels were beaming down from their orbiting ark to seed civilization. She drowsed; she read ethnography, the French theorists, rediscovering an old emnity for the incomprehensible Jacques Lacan, reacclimating her mind to the rigorous ingrown language of academics. But after a while, after a shorter while each day, it grew boring in the sun and Donnell would stray into her thoughts. Drowsy, nonspecific thoughts, images of him, things he had said, as if he were brushing against her and leaving bits of memory clinging.
May the 18th was her mother’s birthday. She had forgotten it until an orderly in the commissary asked her for the date, but all through dinner she thought about what her family might have done to celebrate. Probably nothing. Her father might have given her mother a present, mumbled a tepid endearment and gone out onto the porch to twang his guitar and sing his sad, complaining songs. Her mother would have tidied the kitchen, put on her frumpy hat and scurried off to church for a quick telling of the beads, for fifteen minutes of perfumed darkness at the chipped gilt feet of the Virgin. The Church had been her one stab at individualism, her single act of rebellion against her husband, who had been an atheist. Not that he had tried to dominate her. She had slipped into his shadow like a fearful mouse who had been searching her whole life for such a shelter and would be happy to scuttle around his feet forever. It annoyed Jocundra when she noticed incidences of her mother’s character in herself.
After dinner she had intended to go to the staff meeting - the big showdown, it was rumored, between Brauer and Edman - but Donnell asked her to stay and talk. He had her sit on the bed and himself leaned against the windowledge, his cane propped beside him. For a long time he was silent, merely staring at her, but finally he said, ‘We’re having a private conversation. The cameras quit working.’
His stare unnerved Jocundra; it was calm and inquisitive and not the usual way he looked at her. ‘How do you know?’
‘It doesn’t matter.’ He gave a sniff of amusement. ‘They have enough data on my psychological adjustment, and besides, my adjustment’s complete. I’m ready to leave right now.’
She laughed edgily; though his tone was casual, everything he said had the weight of a pronouncement. ‘You’re not strong enough, not yet.’
‘I want to tell you something about yourself.’ The curtain belled inward, eerily swathing his face in lace; he brushed it away. The ceiling lights diminished the green in his eyes to infrequent refractions. ‘You’re not totally aware of it, because you try to constrain it, but I don’t think you can totally deny it either. You feel something for me, something like love, though maybe that’s too extreme a word tor what you feel because you have been somewhat successful in denying it.’
He paused to let her respond, but she was at first too confused to answer, then annoyed that he would assume so much, then curious because he exhibited such assurance.
‘Of course I’m in love with you.’ He mumbled it as if it were hardly worth mentioning. ‘I know it’s part of the program for me to love you, that you’ve…’ He ran his cane back and forth through his hands. ‘I don’t guess that’s important.’ He stared at her, his mouth thinned, his eyebrows arched, as if what he saw offered a prospect both mildewed and glorious. ‘Do you want to deny anything?’ he asked.
‘No,’ she said, and was surprised at the buoyancy she felt on saying it.
‘The day Magnusson died,’ he said, ‘I went down to a little room next to the lab and watched them chop him up.’
‘You couldn’t have,’ she said, coming to her feet.
‘The usual heavy infestation of the visual cortex,’ he said. ‘Remarkable changes in the ventral tegumentum.’
She started to go to him, but then she thought how he must despise her for lying, and she sat back down, heavy with guilt.
He picked up a paper sack from the windowledge and walked to the bed. ‘I’m going to do something about it. It’s all right.’
‘I’m sorry.’ The foolish sound of the words caused her to laugh, and the bitter laugh dynamited the stoniness of her guilt and left her shaky.
‘Magnusson gave me his notes before he died,’ he said. ‘I think there’s a chance I can use them to prolong my life. I’m not sure, but I’ll never find out here. I’m going to leave.’
‘You can’t!’
‘Sure I can.’ He plucked a set of keys out of the paper sack: she recognized them as the standard set issued to orderlies, keys to the vans and the pantry and various other rooms. ‘The staff is in conference,’ he said. ‘The orderlies are playing poker in the lab. None of the phones or cameras are working. And the gate.’ He smiled. ‘It’s taken care of, too.’
His arguments were smooth, logical, insistent. He had, he said, a right to go where he chose, to spend his time as he wished. What was the future in remaining here to be probed and tested and eventually dissected? He needed her help. Where did her true responsibilities lie? To herself, to him, or to the project? She had no contrary argument, but the thought of being cast adrift with him made her afraid.
‘If you’re worried about my loss to the scientific community,’ he said, ‘I can assure I’m not going to co-operate anymore.’
‘It’s not that,’ she said, hurt. ‘I’m just not sure what’s right, and I don’t think you are either.’
‘Right? Christ!’ He lifted a small tape recorder out of the sack; the cassette within it bore Edman’s handwriting on the label. ‘Listen to this.’
‘Where’d you get that?’
‘Edman’s office. I told him I wanted to see how life looked from inside a crystal ball. It thrilled his tiny soul to have the beast sniffing round his pantry. These were lying about like party favors on the shelves, so I collected a few.’ He punched down the play switch, and Edman’s voice blatted from the speaker:
‘April 27th… (a couch)… Despite all reason to the contrary, romance blooms between Harrison and Verret. I expect one morning I will walk onto the grounds and find a valentine containing their initials carved upon an oak. I’ve today received the package of information concerning Verret’s divorce proceeding. In layman’s terms, it might be said that Verret seems to have a penchant for losers. Her husband, one Charles Messier, a musician; apparently misused her physically: the divorce was granted on the grounds of physical and mental cruelty. I haven’t had time to study it in detail, but there are obvious similarities between the two men. Artistic avocation, both four or five years older than Verret, a general physical resemblance. Of course I am not yet clear how large a part these similarities play in what is now transpiring, but I am convinced we will soon begin to learn. The relationship is, I believe, at a stage of breakthrough… (a sigh)… I must admit to feelings of paternity toward Harrison and Verret in that I have served as their matchmaker… (a laugh)… It does not seem wholly improbable that we may one day be treated to the pageant of a nuptial, one of those such are consummated between prisoners and their loving correspondents - or, more aptly, between terminal patients and their fianc6es. I can easily imagine it. Verret, beautiful in white beneath the arching oaks. Harrison, his eyes ablaze, the lustful groom. And the priest intoning sonorously, “What Ezawa hath joined, let no man put asunder…’”