They walked around the town. There was a wall along the seafront with some rocks at the bottom, and a village green a few feet across. They went back to the field and saw mothers with small children; they went away for lunch and when they came back they saw boys playing football. The man said it was too late to go back. Red Devlin agreed that it was too late to go back. But even though it was too late to go back the field was developed in a much more modest way than originally planned, and though the businessman knew he was every kind of fool he cancelled the supermarket and improved the site only by adding a set of goalposts and some swings and slides. Later the man would occasionally have a drink with Red Devlin and reminisce about Wales and turn the air blue again for old times’ sake.
I remembered this story and I remembered stories about really terrible people Red Devlin had known. There was a story no one knew much about, only a few details had come out after the man in question had been found stabbed to death in a Bangkok canal, and there was a story about a man who had owned a carpet factory in Pakistan a man who prided himself on the quality of his carpets naturally he regretted the necessity but the fact was if you did not use children you did not get the same quality he was a simple businessman his hands were tied and yet one day he set aside the business habits of a lifetime.
I was down to my last chip when I thought I knew what to say.
I said: What if a person was doing something terrible because everybody else did it or anyway some people did it, and then they stopped even though everybody else was doing it and it was dangerous to stop? Wouldn’t that be a dazzling act of goodness?
He said: It could be.
I said: But in that case don’t you see that all the time? Or couldn’t you if you wanted? I thought
I didn’t know how to go on, I was embarrassed to mention all the insane things people had done because they’d talked to Red Devlin.
Red Devlin didn’t say anything. He looked at me, and then he looked at two or three people walking by, and then he looked at the ground.
After a while he said
All I have to do is open my mouth.
He said
That’s what I thought when I was locked up I thought I had to get out because otherwise—
He walked on for a while and then he said
—and when I got out I saw that was what everybody thought they were waiting for me to—
He stopped suddenly on the pavement. He looked at me and he said:
Open Sesame.
I said What?
He said Open Sesame. Here I am back at last to say Open Sesame so people who were just doing what they had to do because everybody has to do what they have to do because everybody is waiting for somebody to say Open Sesame and it’s not a thing that just anybody can say so here I am and I’m saying it and they can stop
I said: I just meant that there was a possibility
He said: That people will do something if they hear the magic words? Or that they will by miraculous dispensation do without the magic words?
I said: That’s not fair. Suppose you were born into a society
He said: Most people are
I said: A slaveowning society
He said: A society of slaves
I said: All I meant was
He said: I liked the Bad Samaritan better. I suppose a Good Samaritan sleeps better nights.
We had turned into his street again, and now he talked to me patiently. He had been saying things that he wanted to say but now he said things he didn’t especially want to say but which he thought would make me sleep better nights. He said patiently
You don’t understand. It’s not a question of what’s fair to expect. Some people do what they do because everybody does it and it doesn’t make them sick that that’s what everybody does it makes them feel trapped once or twice but better most of the time. If somebody says the magic words they wake up for a little while and go to sleep again. You think I should stop feeling sick if somebody does something because they hear the magic words, but it’s not a question of should, it’s a question of what happens. It doesn’t. That is it wouldn’t. It wouldn’t and that’s why I can’t say it any more, I just look at people. Sometimes I look at them thinking What are you waiting for and sometimes I look at them and say What are you waiting for.
We went into the house. We went back upstairs and he explained patiently that if he could go on waking people up for 50 years by saying Open Sesame you could probably say he should do it even if he felt sick but actually he couldn’t say it any more to anyone who was waiting for him to say it. So it just came down to what we had talked about before.
I said: Were you waiting for me to say Open Sesame?
He said: I’m not now, anyway. I’d better write those letters.
He sat down at the desk again and started writing, and I sat down in my chair. It was about midnight. After a while I fell asleep.
I woke up a couple of hours later. There were four or five envelopes on the desk. Red Devlin was sitting on the bed with his back against the wall; I could see the whites of his eyes. I turned on the lamp beside my chair, and now I could see that the pills on the dresser were gone.
He said
Are you my son?
No, I said.
He said
I didn’t think so. I’m glad.
He laughed and said
I didn’t mean that the way it sounds. I just meant you could do better.
That was the last time he laughed. He sat quietly, looking down, as if it tired him to look into a face. I didn’t say I didn’t think I could do better.
After a while his eyes closed.
I waited two or three hours until I was pretty sure there was nothing left but a thing in corduroy trousers and a blue shirt. The clubbed child and the weeping eye and the smiling chessplayer were gone. I took his hand in mine. It was still warm, but cooling. Then I sat on the bed beside him and put his arm over my shoulder.
I sat beside him while the body grew cooler. I thought at one point that if I called a hospital the organs could still be transplanted, but I thought his wife would be upset if she came home to find that even the mortal remains did not remain. In one sense, of course, it is absurd to feel better because the corpse of one’s beloved is anatomically complete; to embrace a dead body with a kidney.
I wished I’d discussed it with him. I did not think his wife would enjoy arriving at a more rational position immediately after discovering the fact of his suicide.
I tried to remember how long it took rigor mortis to set in. I put his arm by his side again and cried on its chilly shoulder. It was all right to do this now that it couldn’t make him feel he had to make an effort, maybe even that he had to go on being sick.
I spent the night beside it. I felt better with the dead thing beside me, reminding me that he had killed the clubbed child and the weeping eye.
In the morning his cheek was ice cold. It was about 5:00 when I woke up; the light was still on. I lay for a little while by the hard, cold thing on the bed, thinking I should get up and do something. I thought: Well anyway he doesn’t have to get up. He’d said once that he woke every morning at 5:00 and lay staring at the ceiling for two or three hours, hoping to fall asleep again and telling himself he might as well get up. After five or ten minutes he would see the smiling chessplayer for the first time that day, and tell himself he might as well get up, and lie staring at the ceiling.
I put on his denim jacket, and emptied the pockets. Then I took the letters from the table and went down the street to post them.
6
A good samurai will parry the blow
I got home one night about 9:00. Sib was typing Sportsboat and Waterski International.