“I used to think the purpose of life was to do God’s will,” Joe Mantila said.
“How do you define God?”
“God made the universe.”
“Have you ever seen Him?”
“Hey,” Joe Mantila said, “I read this story where the military shoots down this angel. You know? And it’s wounded or something.” He developed the plot for Ferde Heinke’s benefit, repeating the details endlessly.
“I read that,” Ferde Heinke said.
Joe Mantila said, “It’s funny all the different things she knows. Rachael, I mean. Maybe she really is a superior mutant.” Gesturing, he went on, “I wouldn’t be surprised to discover that she has those powers mutants have. I mean, she’s not like anybody else. When she says something, you know—it’s right. Maybe she has that faculty of—what is it?—reading the future.”
“Precognition,” Ferde Heinke said.
“You think so?”
“No,” he said. “That was the whole point of the story. She’s actually a human being, and there’s really a lot of human beings not like the military.”
“If she was here now,” Joe Mantila said, “and she heard us talking, you know what she’d do?”
“She’d laugh.”
“Yeah,” Joe Mantila said. “You notice that most things like what other people like you and I believe, she don’t believe? When you talk to her, she doesn’t even hear you. Like all the different things we do, the Organization and the Beings from Earth. I think she really is a superior mutant, and after everybody else is gone she’ll take over the world.”
Ferde Heinke said, “I think this is the last dying days of our society, the way Rome went out.”
“Why did Rome fall?”
“Rome fell because their society became hollow. And then the barbarians swarmed in and that was the end.”
“They burned all the libraries and buildings,” Joe Mantila said.
“Tough,” Ferde Heinke said.
“That was wrong; they killed all the Christians, they walled them up in the catacombs and set animals on them.”
“It was the Romans that did that,” Ferde Heinke said. “In the gladiator fights. The Romans hated the Christians because they knew that the Christians would pull down their empty society, and they did.”
“The Emperor Constantine was a Christian,” Joe Mantila disagreed. “It was the barbarians who killed the Christians, not the Romans.”
They argued indefinitely.
17
The Four Aces Motel was a series of square stucco cabins, modern in appearance, Californian in style, well located at the edge of the highway entering San Francisco from the south. The neon sign was immense. The interior of each cabin was a dim chamber, and in the center of the chamber was the shower.
After the paying guest had set down his suitcases and closed the door against the fatigue and glare of the drive, he looked about and saw the bed—clean, wide—and the lamp—brass and slender and amazingly tall—and then he saw the shower. And the guest stripped off his sweaty clothes, his slacks and shorts and sport shirt and shoes, and went happily into the shower.
Under his bare toes the floor was a rough and sensuous porous stone, similar to limestone but sprayed a pastel blue-gray. The walls, also porous and stone-like, were green. The shower was a part of the room, not an annex. A foot-high rampart of adobe blocks retained the water. The blocks, were irregular, like the foundation of a ruined Spanish fort, and the guest felt as if he—or she—were standing in the center of some ancient, secure, unchanging structure in which he or she was free to do what he liked, be what he wished.
Beneath the shower of cabin C, Patricia Gray stood with her legs apart as she reached to scrub her ankles.
The door of the cabin was partly open, and the late-afternoon sunlight poured in through the slot. And with the sunlight, the image of gravel, a field of gravel, spreading to the square of lawn and deck chairs and beach umbrellas in the shade behind the neon sign. And then El Camino itself The trucks and the San Francisco commuter traffic went nose to tail, and the noise was a deep, ceaseless drumming. Now they were leaving the city. Now, at this moment at the end of the day, the traffic moved south.
Over the bed a plastic Emerson radio played a dance record. On the bed Art lay spread out in his slacks and shirt, reading a magazine.
“Do me a favor?” Patricia said.
“A towel?”
“No,” she said, “turn off the radio, would you? Or get something else.” The jukebox tunes reminded her of the station, her job, and Jim Briskin.
Art made no move to get up.
“Come on,” she said. He did not stir, so she took the immaculate white bath towel supplied by the motel and padded across the room. Drizzling water from her hair and head and body, she clicked the switch of the radio.
“Okay?” she said. She was afraid enough of him to remain close to the radio as she dried herself. The silence seemed to oppress him. “Get something on it,” he said.
She said, “I don’t want anything from the outside.” This must be complete, she thought. If it is going to have any chance at all.
From the clothes that she had bought him, she picked up a red-and-gray sport shirt. He had worn it once, on the drive from San Francisco; holding it, she went to the bed and said, “Can I wear this?”
Glancing up, he saw her and the shirt. “Why?”
“I just want to,” she said.
“It’s too big.”
But she put on his shirt. The bottom of it trailed across her thighs. From one of her suitcases she took a pair of jeans and put them on; she unfastened her hair and began to comb it. In the jeans and sport shirt she padded about the room; she carried bottles and jars and tubes and packages to the medicine cabinet in the bathroom and to the top of the dresser. The closet was already full of her clothes. She did not unpack the rest; there was no room.
“You sure have a lot of stuff,” Art said.
“No,” she said, “not so much.”
“All those b-b-bottles.”
She went into the tiny kitchen to see if there was cupboard space.
They had brought no cooking utensils. On the drainboard was a package of cookies and four navel oranges and a carton of milk and a loaf of Langendorf bread and ajar of cheese spread. And, by itself, a fifth of Gallo port. She opened the wine and, rinsing out the tumbler supplied by the motel, poured herself a glass.
Through the back window of the motel, she saw a yard of planks and uncompleted concrete foundations. On a clothesline trousers and work shirts hung. A desolate scene, she thought. Returning to the living room, she said, “This is nice here.”
At the front door she stood watching the trucks go by. The time was seven o’clock, and the sun was beginning to set. The flow of traffic had dwindled. They were already home, she thought, the commuters in their business suits and neckties.
“When did you want to eat?” she said.
“I don’t care.”
“There’s a coffee shop up the road,” she said. “You want to go there?” He tossed aside the magazine. “Sure.”
As they walked along the shoulder of the highway, she said, “What’s wrong?”
“I don’t know.”
“Do you want to drive on? Stop somewhere else? We could drive all night, if you want.”
“You got your s-s-stuff unpacked.”
“I can repack it,” she said.
The door of the coffee shop was propped open. It was a wide, modern coffee shop, with a counter at one side and booths at the other.
Cars were pulled up in the gravel lot beside it. Most of the people were from the motel, middle-aged men and women on their vacations. She thought: From the East, from Ohio, coming out hereto California for a week, in their Olds-mobiles.