“What’s that?” Lascal asked.
“A transgressor. An evildoer.”
“Ah. An old fashioned word. I’ve never heard it pronounced.”
“A transgressor automatically assumes that something besides him or herself is to blame, or at least puts on that front. Physical or mental damage can be blamed…Goldsmith, just to make polite conversation, to put a good face on things, would agree with your presumed judgment that he is insane, and excuse himself by making a metaphor…That he is a shattered egg.”
“He didn’t deny his guilt in the beginning. He said that he did it and that he bore sole responsibility.”
“But you didn’t record those interviews. I can’t learn anything from his tone or his mannerisms.”
Lascal smiled at the implied accusation. “We were more than a little confused and indecisive.”
“I don’t blame you,” Martin said. “Not for that.”
“What do you blame us for, Dr. Burke?”
Martin declined Lascal’s steady gaze. “The obvious…That Albigoni didn’t turn Goldsmith over to the pd immediately.”
“We’ve been through this before,” Lascal said, looking out the window again. They moved rapidly south through light late morning slave traffic, passing the old glass and concrete resorts and ground level neighborhoods of San Clemente. “Mr. Albigoni thought that if he turned Goldsmith in, he would never really know why Goldsmith killed those kids. His daughter. And he had to know.”
Martin leaned forward. “He thought the therapists would do a large scale patchup, a general radical therapy, and Goldsmith would no longer be Goldsmith. Might not even be a poet.”
Lascal did not deny this.
“I suspect Albigoni believes that what made Mr. Goldsmith a good poet is intimately linked with his being a murderer,” Martin said. “It’s an old misconception supported by science only when psychology was a squalling infant, that genius is close to madness.”
“Perhaps, but if Mr. Albigoni learns there’s any link at all, and there’s a possibility he brought a scorpion into his home and lost his daughter…”
Martin leaned back, witnessing yet again Paul Lascal’s transformation into a paid surrogate of Albigoni, a man whose job it was to anticipate the whims and emotions of his boss. How solidly grounded was Lascal’s sense of self?
“Who are you, Mr. Lascal?”
“Beg pardon?”
“What put you on the Albigoni spin?”
“I’m not the one you’re examining, Dr. Burke.”
“Idle curiosity.”
“Out of place,” Lascal said coldly. “I’m an employee of Mr. Albigoni, and I’m also a friend—though not a social equal, perhaps. You think of it as symbiosis. I think of it as helping a great man get through this life with a little more efficiency, a little more time to do what he is truly good at doing. The perfect lackey, you might say, but I’m content.”
“I don’t doubt you are. That’s a remarkably cogent self analysis, Mr. Lascal.”
Lascal regarded him coldly. “Ten more minutes, unless we hit another knot.”
34
When he goes to sleep, the worlds are his… He becomes a great king, or a learned man; he enters the high and the low. As a great king travels as he pleases around his own country, with his entourage, even so here, taking with him his senses, he travels in his own body as he pleases.
Writing for hours on end until his muscles cramped, his stomach growling for lack of food, stopping only for a few moments each hour to relieve a persistent and irritating diarrhea, Richard Fettle reveled in his diabolic concentration, once again slave to words. The day before, he had suspended all judgment over what he was writing; he no longer revised, he hardly even bothered to keep his grammar tidy.
Nadine had abandoned him unnoticed and probably for good sometime the night before. He had since written an additional thirty crabbed pages and was running out of paper but no matter; he now had no qualms whatsoever about using the despised slate. The physical quality of the words he was writing meant nothing; only the act itself.
He was happy.
stopped to survey the blood, he would find auspices in the sprayed life of these poor adoring chickens, his students. To realize with a fresh, exhilarating terror the extent to his freedom, and how precarious it was. How much longer could he live, knowing what he knew? He squatted among the flesh ruins for yet another hour, watching the blood grow dark and sticky. He philosophized about its senseless attempt to coagulate, to shut out the bad world, when in fact death was here and the bad world had already triumphed. So had the bad world triumphed in him; he was as dead as his students, but miraculously able to move and think and question; dead in life, free. He was loosed of the bonds his previous years of socialized life had clamped to him; slipped of the reputation that had smothered him. Why then didn’t he leave the apartment and begin immediately to prolong his living death? The longer he stayed, the more chance his freedom would be discovered and circumscribed.
He left the room of slaughter and went into his office, to look over his serried ranks of works, the books and plays and poems, the volumes of letters, all superseded. Before he could leave all this, he had to write his manifesto. That could only be done with a pen and ink, not with the vanishing electronic words of a slate.
The last sheet of paper was full. Richard stacked the pages neatly to one side and brought out the slate, grinning at the ironic divergence. He paused for a moment, sensing his bowels shift, waited for the return of some temporary stability, then switched on the slate and continued.
“I cannot say I am sorry for what I have done. The poet must go where no others go, or where the despised go. I am now there, and the freedom is breathtaking. I can do and write about whatever I want; no greater penalties or oppobrium *cheep*
MISSPELLED WORD I Suggest OPPROBRIUM.
“Dammit.” He shut down the correction feature.
“can be added. I can write about racial hatred, my own hatred, approvingly or disapprovingly; I can suggest that the whole human race should be immolated, children first; that the therapied should be burned alive in their concrete mausoleums. I can shout that the Selectors are correct and that the imposition of ultimate pain is the only way to cure some of the diseases of this society should it continue to exist; perhaps infants should be subjected to the hellcrown to prepare them for the evil they will inevitably do. But writing is dead for me, too; I can do whatever I want. Catch me soon. I will not stay for your inane judgments. I have other things to experiment with.
“I am the only human being alive, and that is because I am dead.”
Having written this manifesto, he pinned the sheet of paper to the wall with his father’s knife, the weapon of his freedom, and walked past the door to the room of slaughter, not looking in, aware of his freedom yet again, like a new suit of clothes or no clothes at all.
He left the apartment, the comb, the city. Outside, it seemed he might ascend into the clouds, become a passing vapor and rain down on all that he might be absorbed by them, the whole human race choosing to slaughter itself, to truly be free; and then perhaps a few, a hundred or a thousand, of those also dead-alive, the survivors of this truth-gathering, would
He stopped and rushed to the bathroom. Purged himself as he imagined Goldsmith might have felt purged; wondered if he could use that metaphor shitting himself clean or had already used it; could not remember. Returned to the slate, hitching up his pants.