Universe 11 - [Anthology] Read online

  “It’s San Pablo.” he announced. “Not Gibraltar or anywhere else. There’ll be a plane waiting’ for us when we get there.”

  VI

  Two aircraft were waiting, a pair of patched-up DC-7s that had once belonged to the Spanish airline known as Iberia. Mrs. Alexander had recruited one of her pilots from the DPs who had shown up at Export Dora; the other, a retired TAW veteran from Riverside, California, had made it by himself to the airfield by virtue of a prior acquaintance with Seville and its American military installations. Both men were eager to carry passengers home, one via a stopover in Lisbon and the other by using Madrid as a steppingstone to the British Isles. The hope was that they could transfer their passengers to jet aircraft at these cities’ more cosmopolitan airports, but no one spoke very much about the real obstacles to success that had already begun stalking them: civil chaos, delay, inadequate communications, fuel shortages, mechanical hangups, doubt and ignorance, a thousand other things.

  At twilight, then, Lawson stood next to Dai Secombe at the chainlink fence fronting San Pablo’s pothole-riven runway and watched the evening light glimmer off the wings of the DC-7s. Bathed in a muted dazzle, the two old airplanes were almost beautiful. Even though Mrs. Alexander had informed the DPs that they must spend the night in the installation’s movie theater, so that the Bluebird could make several more shuttle runs to Exportadora, Lawson truly believed that he was bound for home.

  “Good-bye,” Secombe told him.

  “Good-bye? . . . Oh, because you’ll be on the other flight?”

  “No, I’m telling you good-bye, Lawson, because I’m leaving. Right now, you see. This very minute.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “Back into the city.”

  “How? What for?”

  “I’ll walk, I suppose. As for why, it has something to do with wanting to appease Mrs. Alexander’s `they,’ also with finding out what’s to become of us all. Seville’s the place for that, I think.”

  “Then why’d you even come out here?”

  “To say good-bye, you bloody imbecile.” Secombe laughed, grabbed Lawson’s hand, shook it heartily. “Since I couldn’t manage to change your mind.”

  With that, he turned and walked along the chainlink fence until he had found the roadway past the installation’s commissary. Lawson watched him disappear behind that building’s complicated system of loading ramps. After a time the Welshman reappeared on the other side, but against the vast Spanish sky, his compact, striding form rapidly dwindled to an imperceptible smudge. A smudge on the darkness.

  “Good-bye,” Lawson said.

  That night, slumped in a lumpy theater chair, he slept with nearly sixty other people in San Pablo’s movie house. A teenage boy, over only a few objections, insisted on showing all the old movies still in tins in the projection room. As a result, Lawson awoke once in the middle of Apocalypse Now and another time near the end of Kubrick’s The Left Hand of Darkness. The ice on the screen, dune like sastrugi, ranged from horizon to horizon, chilled him, touching a sensitive spot in his memory. “Little America,” he murmured. Then he went back to sleep.

  Vll

  With the passengers bound for Lisbon, Lawson stood at the fence where he had stood with Secombe, and watched the silver pin wheeling of propellers as the aircraft’s engines engaged. The DC-7 flying to Madrid would not leave until much later that day, primarily because it still had several vacant seats and Mrs. Alexander felt sure that more English-speaking DPs could still be found in the city.

  The people at the gate with Lawson shifted uneasily and whispered among themselves. The engines of their savior airplane whined deafeningly, and the runway seemed to tremble. What woebegone eyes the women had, Lawson thought, and the men were as scraggly as railroad hoboes. Feeling his jaw, he understood that he was no more handsome or well groomed than any of those he waited with. And, like them, he was impatient for the signal to board, for the thumbs-up sign indicating that their airplane had passed its latest rudimentary ground tests.

  At least, he consoled himself, you’re not eating potato chips at ten-thirty in the morning. Disgustedly, he turned aside from a jut-eared man who was doing just that.

  “There’re more people here than our plane’s supposed to carry,” the potato-chip crunchier said. “That could be dangerous.”

  “But it isn’t really that far to Lisbon, is it?” a woman replied. “And none of us has any luggage.”

  “Yeah, but-” The man gagged on a chip, coughed, tried to speak again. Facing deliberately away, Lawson felt that the man’s words would acquire eloquence only if he suddenly volunteered to ride in the DC-7’s unpressurized baggage compartment.

  As it was, the signal came to board and the jut-eared man had no chance to finish his remarks. He threw his cellophane sack to the ground, and Lawson heard it crackling underfoot as people crowded through the gate onto the grassy verge of the runway.

  In order to fix the anomaly of San Pablo in his memory, Lawson turned around and walked backward across the field. He saw that bringing up the rear were four men with automatic weapons-weapons procured, most likely, from the installation’s Air Police station. These men, like Lawson, were walking backward, but with their guns as well as their eyes trained on the weirdly constituted band of people who had just appeared, seemingly out of nowhere, along the airfield’s fence.

  One of these people wore nothing but a ragged pair of shorts, another an ankle-length burnoose, another a pair of trousers belted with a rope. One of their number was a doeeyed young woman with an exposed torso and a circlet of bright coral on her wrist. But there were others too, and they all seemed to have been drawn to the runway by the airplane’s engine whine; they moved along the fence like desperate ghosts. As the first members of Lawson’s group mounted into the plane, even more of these people appeared-an assembly of nomads, hunters, hod-carriers, fishers, herdspeople. Apparently they all understood what an airplane was for, and one of the swarthiest men among them ventured out onto the runway with his arms thrown out imploringly.

  “Where you go?” he shouted. “Where you go?”

  “There’s no more room!” responded a blue-jeans-clad man with a machine gun. “Get back! You’ll have to wait for another flight!”

  Oh, sure, Lawson thought, the one to Madrid. He was at the base of the airplane’s mobile stairway. The jut-eared man who had been eating potato chips nodded brusquely at him.

  “You’d better get on up there,” he shouted over the robust hiccoughing of the airplane’s engines, “before we have unwanted company breathing down our necks!”

  “After you.” Lawson stepped aside.

  Behind the swarthy man importuning the armed guards for a seat on the airplane, there clamored thirty or more insistent people, their only real resemblance to one another being 1 their longing for a way out. “Where you go? Where you go?” the bravest and most desperate among them yelled, but they all wanted to board the airplane that Mrs. Alexander’s charges had already laid claim to; and most of them could see that it was too late to accomplish their purpose without some kind of risk-taking. The man who had been shouting in English, along with four or five others, broke into an assertive dogtrot toward ‘ the plane. Although their cries continued to be modestly beseeching, Lawson could tell that the passengers’ guards now believed themselves under direct attack.

  A burst of machine-gun fire sounded above the field and echoed away like rain drumming on a tin roof. The man who . had been asking “Where you go?” pitched forward on his, face. Others fell beside him, including the woman with the “, coral bracelet. Panicked or prodded by this evidence of their assailants’ mortality, one of the guards raked the chain link fence with his weapon, bringing down some of those who had ‘, already begun to retreat and summoning forth both screams ;’ and the distressingly incongruous sound of popping wire. _ Then, eerily, it was quiet again.

  “Get on that airplane!” a guard shouted at Lawson. He W’, was the only passenger still
left on the ground, and everyone ~? wanted him inside the plane so that the mobile stairway could be rolled away.

  “I don’t think so,” Lawson said to himself.

  Hunching forward like a man under fire, he ran toward the gate and the crude mandala of bodies partially blocking it. ~’ The slaughter he had just witnessed struck him as abysmally repetitive of a great deal of recent history, and he did not wish to belong to that history anymore. Further, the airplane behind him was a gross iron-plated emblem of the burden he no .:’, longer cared to bear-even if it also seemed to represent the promise of passage home.

  “Hey, where the hell you think you’re goin’?”

  Lawson did not answer. He stepped gingerly through the corpses on the runway’s margin, halted on the other side of the fence, and, his eyes misted with glare and poignant bewilderment, turned to watch the DC-7 taxi down the scrublined length of concrete to the very end of the field. There the airplane negotiated a turn and started back the way it had come. Soon it was hurtling along like a colossal metal dragonfly, building speed. When it lifted from the ground, its tires screaming shrilly with the last series of bumps before takeoff, Lawson held his breath.

  Then the airplane’s right wing dipped, dipped again, struck the ground, and broke off like a piece of balsa wood, splintering brilliantly. After that, the airplane went flipping, cartwheeling, across the end of the tarmac and into the desolate open field beyond, where its shell and remaining wing were suddenly engulfed in flames. You could hear people frying in that inferno; you could smell gasoline and burnt flesh.

  “Jesus,” Lawson said.

  He loped away from the airfield’s fence, hurried through the short grass behind the San Pablo library, and joined a group of those who had just fled the English-speaking guards’ automatic-weapon fire. He met them on the highway going back to Seville and walked among them as merely another of their number. Although several people viewed his 1505 trousers with suspicion, no one argued that he did not belong, and no one threatened to cut his throat for him.

  As hangdog and exotically nondescript as most of his companions, Lawson watched his tennis shoes track the pavement like the feet of a mechanical toy. He wondered what he was going to do back in Seville. Successfully dodge bullets and eat fried fish, if he was lucky. Talk with Secombe again, if he could find the man. And, if he had any sense, try to organize his life around some purpose other than the insane and hopeless one of returning to Lynchburg. What purpose, though? What purpose beyond the basic, animal purpose of staying alive?

  “Are any of you hungry?” Lawson asked.

  He was regarded with suspicious curiosity.

  “Hungry,” he repeated. “Tiene hambre?”

  English? Spanish? Neither worked. What languages did they have, these refugees from an enigma? It looked as if they had all tried to speak together before and found the task impossible-because, moving along the asphalt under the hot Andalusian sun, they now relied on gestures and easily interpretable noises to express themselves.

  Perceiving this, Lawson brought the fingers of his right hand to his mouth and clacked his teeth to indicate chewing.

  He was understood. A thin barefoot man in a capacious linen shirt and trousers led Lawson off the highway into an orchard of orange trees. The fruit was not yet completely ripe, and was sour because of its greenness, but all twelve or thirteen of Lawson’s crew ate, letting the juice run down their arms. When they again took up the trek to Seville, Lawson’s mind was almost absolutely blank with satiety. The only thing rattling about in it now was the fear that he would not know what to do once they arrived. He never did find out if the day’s other scheduled flight, the one to Madrid, made it safely to its destination, but the matter struck him now as of little import. He wiped his sticky mouth and trudged along numbly.

  VIII

  He lived above the contraceptive shop. In the mornings he walked through the alley to a bakery that a woman with calm Mongolian features had taken over. In return for a daily allotment of bread and a percentage of the goods brought in for barter, Lawson swept the bakery’s floor, washed the utensils that were dirtied each day, and kept the shop’s front counter. His most rewarding skill, in fact, was communicating with those who entered to buy something. He had an uncanny grasp of several varieties of sign language, and on occasion he found himself speaking a monosyllabic patois whose derivation was a complete mystery to him. Sometimes he thought that he had invented it himself; sometimes he believed that he had learned it from the transplanted Sevillanos among whom he now lived.

  English, on the other hand, seemed to leak slowly out of his mind, a thick, unrecoverable fluid.

  The first three or four weeks of chaos following The Change had by this time run their course, a circumstance that surprised Lawson. Still, it was true. Now you could lie down at night on your pallet without hearing pistol reports or fearing that some benighted freak was going to set fire to your staircase. Most of the city’s essential services-electricity, water, and sewerage-were working again, albeit uncertainly, and agricultural goods were coming in from the countryside. People had gone back to doing what they knew best, while those whose previous jobs had had little to do with the basics of day-to-day survival were now apprenticing as bricklayers, carpenters, bakers, fishers, and water and power technicians. That men and women chose to live separately, and that children were as rare as sapphires, no one seemed to find disturbing or unnatural. A new pattern was evolving. You lived among your fellows without tension or quarrel, and you formed no dangerously intimate relationships.

  One night, standing at his window, Lawson’s knee struck a loose tile below the casement. He removed the tile and set it on the floor. Every night for nearly two months he pried away at least one tile and, careful not to chip or break it, stacked it near an inner wall with those he had already removed.

  After completing this task, as he lay on his pallet, he would often hear a man or a woman somewhere in the city singing a high, sweet song whose words had no significance for him. Sometimes a pair of voices would answer each other, always in different languages. Then, near the end of the summer, as Lawson stood staring at the lathing and the wall beams he had methodically exposed, he was moved to sing a melancholy song of his own. And he sang it without knowing what it meant.

  The days grew cooler. Lawson took to leaving the bakery during its midafternoon closing and proceeding by way of the Calle de las Sierpes to a bodega across from. the .bullring. A crew of silent laborers, who worked very purposively in spite of their seeming to have no single boss, was dismantling the Plaza de Toros, and Lawson liked to watch as he drank his wine and ate the breadsticks he had brought with him.

  Other crews about the city were carefully taking down the government buildings, banks, and barrio chapels that no one frequented anymore, preserving the bricks, tiles, and beams as if in the hope of some still unspecified future construction. By this time Lawson himself had knocked out the rear wall of his room over the contraceptive shop, and he felt a strong sense of identification with the laborers craftily gutting the bullring of its railings and barricades. Eventually, of course, everything would have to come down. Everything.

  The rainy season began. The wind and the cold. Lawson continued to visit the sidewalk cafe near the ruins of the stadium; and because the bullring’s destruction went forward even in wet weather, he wore an overcoat he had recently acquired and staked out a nicely sheltered table under the bodega’s awning. This was where he customarily sat.

  One particularly gusty day, rain pouring down, he shook out his umbrella and sat down at this table only to find another man sitting across from him. Upon the table was a wooden game board of some kind, divided into squares.

  “Hello, Lawson,” the interloper said.

  Lawson blinked and licked his lips thoughtfully. Although he had not called his family to mind in some time, and wondered now if he had ever really married and fathered children, Dai Secombe’s face had occasionally floated up before him in
the dark of his room. But now Lawson could not remember the Welshman’s name, or his nationality, and he had no notion of what to say to him. The first words he spoke, therefore, came out sounding like dream babble, or a voice played backward on the phonograph. In order to say hello he was forced to the indignity. almost comic, of making a childlike motion with his hand.

  Secombe, pointing to the game board, indicated that they should play. From a carved wooden box with a velvet lining he emptied the pieces onto the table, then arranged them on both sides of the board. Chess, Lawson thought vaguely, but he really did not recognize the pieces-they seemed changed from what he believed they should look like. And when it came his turn to move, Secombe had to demonstrate the capabilities of all the major pieces before he, Lawson, could essay even the most timid advance. The piece that most reminded him of a knight had to be moved according to two distinct sets of criteria, depending on whether it started from a black square or a white one; the “rooks,” on the other hand, were able, at certain times, to jump an opponent’s intervening pieces. The game boggled Lawson’s understanding. After ten or twelve moves he pushed his chair back and took a long, bittersweet taste of wine. The rain continued to pour down like an endless curtain of deliquescent beads.