I guess it must have been the infirmary. It was hard to say for certain; all three buildings had evidently played mutiple roles, and everything was presently a complete mess. I tried to ignore the corpses and began searching the place without any conscious objective in mind. I was looking for something but it didn’t much matter what it was. The Holy Grail, the Golden Fleece, the Fountain of Youth – any of these would have done.
What I found was a combination of the three. It was a half-gallon jug of pure grain alcohol, medicinal grade, distilled in Johannesburg and certified fit for human consumption. Grain alcohol. Around two hundred proof. Bottled and capped and labeled and, in the midst of the most extraordinary display of destructive power since Nagasaki, remarkably not to say miraculously unbroken.
And I held it in my hand and looked at it, and all at once I knew what it was I had been looking for, and that this was it. The Elixir of Life. The Universal Solvent. The Final Solution.
I found a gallon of bottled spring water and a plastic coffee cup, and I took the two jugs and the cup and went back to where Plum was sleeping. She was tossing restlessly, and I put a hand on her forehead and gentled her into a more restful sleep. Then I filled the coffee cup halfway with alcohol, topped it off with spring water, and drank the result.
It tasted like vodka, which was only right, since that is what it really was. Hundred proof vodka. It burned. It had a hell of a kick to it.
I liked it.
I emptied the cup and filled it up again, this time with a touch less alcohol and a touch more water. I worked on the drink and let my mind unwind and work the knots out of itself. Just what the missionary ordered, I decided, sipping appreciatively.
I closed my eyes. The missionaries, priests and nuns alike, were now either in Heaven or not, depending upon the validity of their basic assumptions, which they were now unfortunately in a position to confirm or deny. Bowman, my more or less fellow agent, was probably dead. So was Knanda Ndoro, the Retriever of Modonoland.
As the alcohol assumed its rightful place in my bloodstream, it became clear to me that I did not very much care about Sam Bowman – if he was a real secret agent, death was part of the game, and if he was a fraud, sic semper bolonis. Nor did I care if Knanda Ndoro got his, or if his royal treasury was lost forever. Royal treasuries are fun, but this one looked to be more trouble than it was worth, and farther out of reach than any grapes to any fox, as far as that went.
Nor, finally, did I really care about the missionaries. The only bothersome thing about Sheena’s annihilation of them was that Plum and I had walked in on its aftermath. Had I been in New York at the time, they could have died in the news without upsetting me a whole hell of a lot. A missionary, after all, assumes much the same sort of an occupational risk as does a secret agent or an African dictator. There is always the possibility that martyrdom will pave the road to sainthood, anyway.
I filled the cup and looked at it like Hamlet at Yorick. I sipped, and shuddered at the stuff, which I had perhaps not diluted as much as I’d intended, and swallowed, and shuddered again, and then basked in the flow of warmth from my middle. The alcohol brought an awful clarity of vision. I was in Modonoland, I realized now, for no good purpose whatsoever. The whole venture was stupidly negative. I had come here because I had not liked where I was, and because everything had been getting worse, and because I wanted to go someplace warm. I had fled from the implication that I might have ambivalent feelings toward my ersatz daughter, Minna, and had retaliated by taking a fourteen-year-old mistress. I had-
I had gone off, I saw now, on a particularly witless tangent.
And it was time to get back on the main road.
My mind worked as quickly as it could, stumbling now and again but plunging on undaunted. First things, I decided, first. I would begin setting my house in order and making some sort of logical pattern for my life. I would get out of the jungle and back to civilization, and I would find a place for Plum, and I would return to New York and marry Kitty and adopt Minna and move out of the mad jungle that was Manhattan. I could picture myself in some clean and neat suburban community in Jersey or Connecticut, say. A comfortable little ranch house. Steaks grilling over charcoal in the backyard. A power mower shaving the grass in front. Children gamboling like lambs over the back lawn.
I drank again and thought of Peter Pan. If you grew up you couldn’t fly. Well, it was time I grew up, and maybe it was time I stopped flying. A house in the suburbs, a wife, a family, a station wagon, a snow blower, a freezer, a power hedge trimmer, a dishwasher, a family room, a color television set, a breakfast nook – I closed my eyes and saw all the trappings of the good life fitting themselves into the picture, explaining and defining me. No more a ratty apartment on West 107th Street. No more crazy-quilt political organizations. No more chaos, no more anarchy.
No more trips to places like this one.
After a while I capped both jugs and slipped out of the building without waking Plum. There was no moon in view, but the sky was bright with stars. I was just beginning to get used to the southern skies, just beginning to recognize the various constellations. I looked up at them now and imagined myself in my spacious tree-shaded back yard in, say, Paramus, gazing up at the stars and contemplating the merits of pre-emergence crabgrass killer.
It sounds, I suppose, like a joke, but it was a joke I had given off laughing over long ago, and old jokes tend to become new truths. I had always wondered why sooner or later everyone packed it in and went to the suburbs. Everyone did this because sooner or later everyone realized that it was the only sensible thing to do. Sooner or later everyone realized that one had to put points on one’s compass and chart the course of one’s life. If it had taken me rather more time than usual, well, that might even be all to the good; it would give me things to look back fondly on in old age.
My head buzzed with plans. Cancel the League for the Restoration of Cilician Armenia; substitute the Parent-Teacher Association. Cross out the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization and write in the Flat Hills Country Club. I could see it all now, and it all looked good. Charge accounts, color-coordinated bathrooms, labor-saving devices – all the little human touches that separate us from the apes.
If any doubts attempted to surface, I was too involved with my vision to pay them mind. I went back for the alcohol, cut it with some water, drank. I drifted outside again and wandered beneath the stars, only to return again for another drink. After quite a long while of this, the birds began singing their heads off. It was still perfectly dark when they did this, but I guess they knew something, because after about fifteen minutes of tweet-tweet-tweet the sky turned light with dawn.
Shortly after this happened, Plum woke up with a start. That’s not one of my all-time favorite expressions, but it’s what she did. Heretofore she had always awakened rather gently and comfortably, I’d usually been on hand when she woke up, and of late I’d often taken an active part in waking her, in which case the mornings started out very pleasantly for both of us.
(And this, I told myself now, would have to stop. In a sense, it constituted anticipatory infidelity to Kitty, my bride and helpmate to be. Furthermore, it struck me that the recurring carnal knowledge of a fourteen-year-old Welsh-African hybrid did not quite jibe with my new role as suburban pillar.)
This morning, as I said, she woke with a start. There was this sudden thrashing about, accompanied by a volley of small yelps. I held onto her and said things like, “Easy, easy,” and “It’s all right,” and the yelps and thrashing eased off and stopped.