This was, of course, just the response Daddy was looking for.
When they had finished their gross display, I begged for a moment’s reprieve. Daddy dismissed the band and returned the accordion player his cowboy hat.
“Don’t work him too hard, until we have some idea of his breaking point,” the doctor advised. “Besides, I’d like to see the intern, if you’ll excuse me. Those photographs gave me an idea: there are some patients in the hospital…”
“Have you thought of anything, Dennis?”
“In a way, yes. Is Bruno still around?”
“He should be downstairs.”
“If he were to tell me about the things he enjoys—the very worst things—in the long run he might think of more horrors than you. They seem to come naturally to him.”
“Good idea. I’ll send for him.”
“Rocky too, if she’s down there. I remember how she watched me at the boxing match. She’d be able to help you quite a lot.”
As Daddy went out of the room, the doctor returned, escorting a caravan of wheelchairs and litters. Photographs are no equivalent for the real thing.
It went on that way for four hours, and every minute seemed worse than the one before. Bruno had a limitless imagination, especially when it was abetted by alcohol and his wife. He told me about his favorite fights to begin with. He told me what he liked to do with pets—and what he would like to do if he had the time. Then he discoursed on the mysteries of love, a subject on which Rocky too was eloquent.
After two hours of these and other pleasures, I asked to have some coffee. Rocky left for it and returned with a steaming mug from which I took one greedy swallow before I realized it was not coffee. Rocky had remembered my peculiar attitude toward blood.
When I had been revived with smelling salts, Daddy brought in more entertainers. They had come to the hospital directly after their last fight at the Armory. For some reason, most of what happened after that point I can no longer remember.
We were out on the tile terrace of the hospital, Daddy, Julie, and I. Below us the Mississippi was a pool of utter blackness and unknown extent. It was an hour after sunset, and the moon had not yet risen. The only light came from the North, where the great auroral floodlights swept out from the horizon across the constellations of the north.
“Five minutes,” Daddy announced nervously.
In five minutes, radio stations all over the world would begin to broadcast my performance of the night before. I had heard an aural equivalent of my electroencephalograms, and I wasn’t worried. In a war based on esthetics, that recording was a Doomsday machine.
“Does your head still hurt?” Julie asked, brushing a feather-light hand over my bandages.
“Only when I try to remember last night.”
“Let me kiss the hurt away.”
“Three minutes,” Daddy announced, “and stop that. You’re making me nervous.”
Julie straightened her blouse, which was made of some wonderful, sheer, crinkly nylon. I had really begun to admire some of the uses of clothing.
We watched the aurora. All over the city, lights had been turned off. Everyone, the whole world, was watching the aurora.
“What will you do now that you’re High Cathode?” Julie asked, to make the time pass.
“In a few minutes the revolution should be over,” Daddy replied. “I don’t think I’d like administrative work. Not after this.”
“You’re going to resign?”
“As soon as they let me. I’ve got the itch to paint some more. Did you know that I paint? I did that self-portrait that’s over my desk. I think it’s pretty good, but I should be able to do better. In any case, it’s traditional for retired generals to paint. And then I might do my memoirs. I’ve picked a title for them: The Esthetic Revolution.”
“Or Viva Dingo!” Julie suggested.
“Ten seconds,” I announced.
We watched the northern skyline. The aurora was a curtain of bluish light across which bands and streamers of intense whiteness danced and played.
At first you couldn’t notice any difference. The spectacle glimmered with the same rare beauty that has belonged to it from time immemorial, but tonight its beauty was that of a somber Dies Irae, played just for us.
Then one of the white bands that was shooting up from the horizon disappeared, like an electric light being switched off. It seemed unnaturally abrupt, but I couldn’t be sure.
For a long while nothing more happened. But when five of the arcing lights snapped out of the sky at the same moment, I knew that the Masters were beginning their exodus.
“Elephantiasis, I’ll bet.”
“What’s that, Dennis?”
“The last picture in the bunch you showed me. I remember it very clearly.”
The auroral display was less bright by half when they came to the hillbilly band. I turned on the radio just to be sure. Through all the blasts and shrieks and whistles of my neural patterns, there was an unmistakable rhythm of Ooom-pah-pah, Ooom-pah-pah.
When the broadcast came to Rocky’s unspeakable potion, there was a tremendous blast across the heavens. For an instant the entire sky was stained white. The white faded. The aurora was only a dim blue-white shadow in the north. There was hardly a trace of beauty in it. It flickered meaninglessly in random patterns.
The Masters had left Earth. They couldn’t stand the barking.