Joan, he realized, was still watching the ants. But not with anguish; on her Buddha-like face he saw a faint, gentle smile.
Rudolph Balkani sat at his elaborate, solar-battery-powered, justifying typewriter and let the
words pour from his fingers. More than two days without sleep, but what did it matter? The metham- phetamine tablets in his silver pill-box would keep him going until he had finished.
Only a single light burned in the room: the unshaded bulb over the cluttered desk on which he worked. The rest of the room, including the sprawled figure of the ruined robot Joan Hiashi, lay in shadow. It seemed to him as if the single bulb held back, with steadily diminishing strength, a blackness so heavy and thick as to be almost touched.
He had locked the door; several times people had knocked on it but Balkani had told them to go away. They had. Both the intercom and the vidphone had been carefully smashed. The bust of Freud had done them in, too.
Now the bronze, frowning father-figure lay facedown on the floor, its anger spent. The time had arrived for the son to create a universe. Feverishly Rudolph Balkani labored on? giving birth in the form
of a book to the new universe that would displace the universe of Freud, together with all the other universes before it. A generation of young people would take this book as their Bible in the revolution of youth against age.
As he worked he hummed a snatch of a tune, always the tune of one of the advertising jingles which he had collected and studied in his early years. How much he had learned from TV commercials! While others turned down the TV set when the commercials came on, Balkani turned them up. The programs had nothing to sell but middle-class morality, a dreary product at best, but the commercials offered a
world where dreams were for sale, where youth and health came in a box, and all pain and suffering were smoothed over with long, beautiful, slow-motion hair. Avant-garde films? Balkani jeered at them. Nothing lay in the most surrealistic of them to compare with the charisma of TV commericals. The work of the dedicated shoestring movie-makers of the ’sixties and ’seventies was now mercifully forgotten, but video-tape copies of erotic soap and beer commercials from the same period now brought bids of up to two hundred UN dollars from collectors.
At this moment Balkani stood ready to finish his masterpiece, Oblivion Therapy. Why not? The Joan Hiashi case, the one remaining piece in the cosmic crossword puzzle, had fallen—in an unexpected way, to be sure—in place. All alone in his office, Balkani laughed aloud. How simple it had become, after all. A gigantic shaggy dog story, where the whole point of the joke consisted in the fact that no point existed.
What lay behind it all?
Oblivion.
Suddenly Balkani stopped. The last sentence which he had typed had a ring of finality to it. Yes, he had written the concluding sentence of this, his life’s magnum opus. Carefully he removed the sheet from the typewriter and placed it with the rest of the manuscript; he then wrapped the manuscript with care and precision and addressed it to his New York publisher. He placed the package in the out-going mail tray and the autonomic mechanism of the tray at once whisked it from the room. So that was that.
Shuffling wearily, he made his way over to the
ample medical supply cabinet, feeling at last the effects of so much lack of sleep. An overdose of quinidine, he said to himself as he lifted out the hypodermic; that should provide the necessary cardiac arrest.
With a grunt, he sat down at the foot of his analyst’s couch, rolled up his sleeve and gave himself the injection. His arm, from so many previous injections, had become insensitive; he felt nothing.
The needle broke as it fell to the floor from his suddenly stiffening fingers, and, with a sigh, he slid back onto the couch.
His subordinates were so much afraid of him that they did not break in and find his body until a day and a half later.
XIII
“What do you mean, you don’t know where he is?” Dr. Choate demanded.
“Just what I said,” answered Ed Newkom, shrugging his shoulders. The two men faced each other for a moment in silence in the little Knoxville hotel room and then Dr. Choate turned away.
“He must have left some indication of how he could be reached,” Choate said.
“Nope,” Ed Newkom said flatly.
“And he took the girl, Joan Hiashi, with him?”
“That’s right, Dr. Choate.”
It had become hot in the hotel room. Choate brought out an Iris linen handkerchief and mopped the perspiration from his forehead; he squinted at the bright sunlight streaming in from the window and felt angry and irritable. “I have to locate him; I have to know whether he plans to undertake the Percy X mission or not. It’s been five days; he may be gone for good.” Defected, he thought, or just plain copped out.
“You don’t know Paul very well, do you?” Ed Newkom said.
“That’s the trouble; I do know him. I know how
involved he gets emotionally with his patients. It’s part of his style of therapy to treat the patient almost as an equal. A bad policy—it puts too much strain on the therapist. He’s probably cracking up.” He felt all at once—not irritation—but genuine concern.
Paul Rivers, at 'that moment, knew an inner calm and peace with himself such as he had never before experienced. He had begun to learn how to do nothing. The Sexual Freedom Society had not understood how to achieve it, but Joan Hiashi did; now she was teaching him, in a run-down one-room cabin in the woods of Tennessee, a good distance from the nearest paved road. She had taught him how to lie in the sun like a vegetable—and grow roots.
Side by side the two of them lay, on the ramshackle porch, only their fingertips touching. Once Paul had half-heartedly tried to kiss her, but she had pushed him gently away and he had taken “no” for an answer. Now, after more than an hour of torpid, mindless silence, she had begun to speak, very slowly.
“I can’t make love anymore; it makes me feel false, now. I’m not a woman, or a man; I’m both and neither. I’m the entire universe and just a single tiny eye, watching. To be a man or a woman is to put on an act—and I’m through with acting. It is good to touch me, though, isn’t it? As it’s good to touch a dog or a cat?”
"Yes,” Paul said, almost inaudibly. This is the first time, he thought, that a woman has known how to let me be. How to be with me without requiring that I pay attention to her, constantly prove to her that she exists. It’s true in a way, he realized, that being a man or a woman is, in a large measure, just an act, a certain culturally determined role that may have very little to do with how we really are inside. How many times, he asked himself, have I made love not because I wanted to but because I wanted to prove to myself and some poor woman that I was a “real man’’?
He glanced over at Joan’s expressionless profile and thought, But she seems so far away. I wonder where she’s gone, deep in her hidden depths.
“Where are you, Joan?” he asked.
“Nowhere.”
“You’re the little Nowhere Girl, aren’t you?”
“You could call me that.”
A bird, probably a hummingbird, caught Paul’s eye; it sat on atree-branch beyond the weed-infested yard, singing. It had one short song which it sang over and over again, always exactly the same. As Paul watched it, he could have sworn that the bird paused and looked back at him, silent for a moment, and thoughtful. Man and bird contemplated each other across the expanse of undulating heat and then, abruptly, the bird resumed its singing. Suddenly, and without warning, Paul felt painful emotions rising into activity within him. Fantasies danced on his brain and unexplainable tears dimmed his vision. Perhaps he had been a bird, once; perhaps this small bird had recognized him as a brother.