Heathern (28 page)

"I am aware of that," he said. "I don't want to know
when it'll be before it happens-"

"I wouldn't tell you if I could," I said. "Just one day you'll
not even know he's there."

"There's a better way?" he asked, and shrugged. I kissed
him and walked toward Thatcher's door. "Take care," he
said. "Find peace."

"I have."

As I entered Thatcher's office I saw the Drydens behind
his desk, she perched next to him; their feet touched,
propped upon its surface. There was nothing so heartening
as seeing two people together who so personified the
Platonic ideal, that those whose souls were split apart in the
life before birth might, through predestination or serendipity or happenstance, find one another in this world and so
rejoin their spirit even if, in time, their conjuncture destroyed them. Several seconds went by before my presence
intruded upon their silent rapture; had I desired, and had I
better learned my corporate lessons, I could have killed
them both before they even said hello.

"Look who's here," said Thatcher. "Hon, how you
doing? You okay?" I nodded. "You sure? Ready to get back
to work yet or you think you need a little more time off?
What's today? Monday? Come in tomorrow, why not?"

"I won't be in tomorrow, Thatcher," I said.

"Well," he said, "we do need to get the train back on the
track around here, but if you need longer-"

"I'm resigning."

"I didn't catch that, hon."

"You did, Thatcher. I'm leaving your employ. Effective
immediately."

"Wait a minute. Come on in here and sit down. Talk to
me about this." He turned to his wife, who looked no worse for her stumbles at the edge; without a word she stood,
smoothed her skirt and picked up her newspaper.

"You'll be missed," she said to me, her look focused upon
the distance, seeming more than one who had merely
chosen blindness; resembling, almost, one of Lester's children, one born without eyes but taught never to seek the
light. Once she closed the door behind her Thatcher patted
the warmed seat next to him.

"Communication's the key in business, hon. Talk to me."

"I'll stand--

"Then stand closer. You thought about this? Don't you
think this might be a little rash?"

"I've been thinking about it for some time, Thatcher, and
I've made up my mind. There's nothing left to talk about. I
only wanted to give notice-"

"Mighty short notice," he said. "You haven't got anything set up elsewhere that I've heard about." His statement
came as declaration rather than question. "What's made
you do this? What set it off?"

"You have to ask?" He seemed utterly, truly baffled; his
feigned behavior came more naturally to him than the
actual-had almost supplanted it entirely, I believed.

"Joanna," he said. "I told you I was sorry, and I meant it."

"You mean it as you say it, Thatcher. Then it's gone."

"Something snaps in my head when I think something's
the matter with Pussums," he said, using the name I knew
he used for his wife when he dealt most intimately with her;
twice, with me, he'd cried out that name at the crescendo of
his joy, surely forgetting in that moment that I was even in
the room. "Who else did I have to go after? Who'd I have to
blame, hon? You can't blame God."

"You mean you can't kill God." He had no reply to that;
perhaps he had someone working on the problem even as
we spoke.

"I don't know what else to tell you," he said. "Even if he didn't seem to be making himself especially useful, it was
still counterproductive to have disposed of him."

"That it was."

"My temper'll get me in deep one day," he said. "I just
thought she was gone. What would I do without her?"

"One day she will be gone," I said. "What then?"

"You don't think I'm upset about this?" It was reassuring
to see such consistency in one man's soul. "You know how I
am. I try to let my emotions out when they ought to come
out, but sometimes they just spill all over the place."

"Well, I can't do the job anymore, Thatcher. It's time for
me to go. Nothing either of us can say will change that."

"You oughta keep your options open," he said. "It's a bad
world out there if you don't have a helping hand, hon.
Getting worse all the time."

"You'd see to it if it wasn't, of course."

He held out his hands, as if to take mine from me; opened
them, palms up, in a display of supplicance. "Omelets need
eggs, hon, omelets need eggs. How're you going to get by?
You need anything-?"

"No," I said, dropping my apartment keys and my
corporate signifyers onto his desk, keeping for the moment
only the card that allowed me access into my office. "I have
to clean out my desk and then I'll be going."

"You've left me speechless," he said, leaning back in his
chair. "It's all too sudden."

"Things happen, Thatcher."

"Joanna," he said, "something I've always wanted to tell
you-"

"What?" I asked, not yet leaving; certainly it shouldn't
have been hope that caused me to linger, one second more.

"I never really did think you ever put your heart into this,
hon," he said. "You can't go halfway and get anywhere."

I almost laughed; didn't; couldn't. "I know. I'll stop off in
Security so they can remove me from the records. I know
it's required."

"I'd have trusted you to do that, hon," he said. "It'll be
hard living without you."

"You'll manage." He smiled, and nodded to himself. It
pleased him when people accepted his worth. I closed his
door, and walked to my office.

Desks breed trash as closets breed hangers; from the
drawers of mine I drew forth and disposed a hundred
restaurants' matchbooks, long-forgotten memos from Finance concerning medical bills, programs from events
unimportant at the time, and less so now; old disks, empty
boxes once housing pens, three dozen copies of my resume
in various states. A memo Bernard sent to me on our first
day at Dryco marked a page in the Executive Health Plan
Guide; he wrote it down, having not yet ascertained if the
offices were bugged.

At least we're working.

The page marked concerned obstetrical care. Into the bin
all went; what I had at home could now be dispersed as
easily as Jensen's had been, as his grandmother's had been,
as Gus's would be. Hard copy memories so transmogrify
with time: notes fade until the words written are not so
unreadable as incomprehensible; letters of love undergo a
reverse metamorphosis, dropping their brilliant wings within safely sealed cocoons and emerging, if broken into, as
something to crawl over the skin. at night; only photographs, as those in more primitive cultures believed, catch a
shard of the soul of the one photographed, nonetheless
memorable only to those who were there at the time.

"Joanna."

Jake startled me, knocking on the doorframe at my
office's entrance; he clung to its side, as if fearful to enter
without an invitation.

"Come in, Jake. It's all right."

"Why the open road?" he asked, stepping in cautiously,
as if uncertain who else might be in there with me.

"It lies before me," I said, placing my purse beneath my
desk. In it were snapshots, combs, two dozen credit cards,
my licenses, my makeup, one hundred new dollars; my
earthly possessions, all unnecessary. "Come to say goodbye?"

"To escort out," he said. He'd had a new cast applied, I
noticed, a simpler splint free of obvious hazard. "Forgive
what was necessary."

"Don't look so sad, Jake," I said. "Your face will freeze
like that. You did what you should have." As he stood there
I thought he might be wondering why he should disagree. I
shredded my superfluous documents.

"I'll miss you overmuch," he said.

"I'm sure you miss Gus more than you'll miss me."

"No," he said. "Why waste the look when you won't see
the bullet?"

"That's so."

"You vizzed ahead?" he asked. "That they'd take
Macaffrey?"

"It was too late to stop it, even before it happened. Do
you understand that?" He nodded.

"What now?"

"Getting out of town. A clear life ensuing," I said. "What
strength I have's my own."

Jake smiled, recognizing my quotes. "Flying?" he asked.

"You know a better way?"

His grin was that of a boy much younger than he could
ever be again. The windows in the Dryco building were
hermetically sealed so that on days when the air conditioning faltered the place might quickly become more unbearable than it already was. As Jake sat down on the couch I
walked across my office, to my own window, one not nearly
so large as any of Thatcher's. The drapes had to come down
to be laundered anyway.

"Joanna," he said, "What's desired? I'll do-"

I climbed up, stepping into the niche between wall's edge
and windowpane. Reaching high above my head I disconnected the hooks; the veil dropped away. From my new
vantagepoint I saw city, land, and ocean; saw the curve of
the world and the unceilinged sky.

"Joanna," Jake said. "Head floorways. You'll fall-"

Lester came to earth, lived and died. Who doesn't? I
didn't.

"Joanna-!"

So through winter morning I flew on alone. A snowfall of
glass showered down, chiming as it drifted toward the street
far below. Sparrows and gulls and doves circled round me,
their wings so like those of angels. The mist of the clouds
wet my face as I cried: cried for my friends, for my parents,
for the millions of this city of God; for those who were lost,
for those who would never be found. The tears I shed for
Lester were ones of joy. There could be no separation from
him; that which once was one would soon be one again. On
the desolate isle a river's width away I'd wait until the day
came, and then return that our world might be recovered:
our sick world, our wonderful world, our blessed world that
wept for its mother. Our first night together, Lester told me
what I once knew I'd hear; I'd always wanted to hear, and
see, and remember all I'd known. You're the Messiah, he
told me, and I remembered, and I knew. You're the
Messiah, he told me; I'd always been the Messiah.

From a report of the 2nd Battalion, 405th Infantry, U.S. Army,
April 1945:

We discovered near Gardelegen an atrocity so awful that it
might well have been committed in another era, or indeed, on
another planet.