Within a month of Kane’s death, the center had been deactivated.
Twelve of the inmates were reassigned to other hospitals and clinics as Project Freud was pronounced abandoned; but the rest of those at Center Eighteen seemed suddenly restored to relative normality. As to whether they had simply put aside pretense, or indeed been jolted back to health by the shock of Kane’s death, no one cared to speculate, not even Hudson Kane, who suspected that the Hamlet theory of their illness was probably correct. Yet with one exception-Cutshaw-the psychiatrist wrote up reports that certified each of the men who had returned to normal functioning as “hopelessly incapacitated for future military service” and recommended their general discharge “with honor.” He would not have these men sent back into combat. For Vincent’s sake.
Cutshaw looked around at the vacant main hall. It had not been restored. Great holes still gaped in the plaster walls, and the ceiling was just as Gomez had left it. A warm, sad smile came to Cutshaw’s face. When he looked at the stairs winding up to the landing, his eyes grew melancholy and grave. For several moments he did not move; then he walked to the stairs and climbed slowly to the second floor. At the landing he hesitated, then continued to Kane’s bedroom door and stopped. He removed his cap and for a time stood silently in front of the door, his head bowed. Then a sudden impulse urged him to knock. And he did, very softly and gently, four times. He opened the door and stepped into the room. He stood just beyond the doorway for a moment, remembering, feeling, drinking in. His gaze caught the window and he walked to the place where the chair had been. He looked down for the stain from the puddled blood that had flowed from the great, deep wound in Kane’s stomach. But he saw nothing there. A death had been covered with floor wax and buffed.
Cutshaw felt in his pocket for a crumpled envelope. He took it out. His name was written on the front. Groper had found it atop a bureau in the room on the morning after Kane’s death. The astronaut reached inside the envelope and removed the letter from Kane. He unfolded it gently. It was written on notebook paper; the thin blue lines had almost faded away. The astronaut wondered again at the firmness of the hand that had produced the bold, neat writing, the graceful script which had the flourish of an invitation to a wedding.
“To Captain Cutshaw,” the letter began. “I have given some thought to one of your problems, the one wherein you question why God does not end man’s honest confusion concerning what it is that He expects him to do, by simply appearing to him and telling him in an unequivocal way. What if a man in shining garments appeared tomorrow hovering in the air above a great city and declared to all that he was sent to us by God; and that as a credential of his claim he would perform any miracle that was asked of him? And suppose that he was asked to make the sun do figure eights in the sky for precisely twenty-six minutes, beginning at noon on the following day. And suppose that he accomplished that. Would we believe him? Well, I think that for a while all would believe, all those who saw what he had done. But after a week or so, I fear only those of good will would still believe; all the others would be talking of autosuggestion, mass hysteria, mass hypnosis, coincidence, unknown forces and the like.
It is not what we see in the sky that helps; it is what is in the heart:
a right hope, a good will. I hope this helps you,” the letter read. Then it went on in an everyday tone: “I am taking my life in the hope that my death may provide a shock that has curative value. In any case, you now have your one example. If ever I have injured you, I am sorry. I have been fond of you. I know someday I will see you again.”
He had signed the letter, “Vincent Kane.”
Cutshaw looked up and out the window. A russet glow had set fire to the sky and bathed the wood in lambent glory. Cutshaw stared with awe and wonder.
Cutshaw was on his way to the mansion’s front entrance when his eye caught the door to Kane’s old office. For a moment he hesitated; then he walked to the office, put his hand on the knob and threw the door open with such force that it banged against the wall and shook down plaster from the ceiling. He stared at where the desk had been and said softly, “May I go?”
The corporal was leaning against the car when he heard the crash from within the mansion. He leaped to alertness. Cutshaw walked out the front door and closed it behind him. He came to the car and then turned for one last look. The corporal followed his stare. “Sure heard some stories about this place, sir,” he said.
“Some psychiatrist they had here—a killer.”
Cutshaw looked into the man’s eyes and said, “He was a lamb.”
He got into the car. As they passed the old sentry gate, the corporal cleared his throat. “If you don’t mind talking about it, sir …” he began. “I guess everyone asks you this….”
Cutshaw met his gaze in the rear-view mirror. “What?” he prompted gently.
“Well, what’s it really like being up there on the moon, sir? I mean, how does it feel?”
For a moment Cutshaw did not answer. Then he glanced out the side window and smiled. “That depends on who’s with you,” he said. Then he sighed, removed his cap, put his head back on the seat and closed his eyes. He was soon asleep.
19
Fairbanks had returned to live with his parents in Plainville, Kansas, where he helped to run his father’s granary business and then took it over when his father died several months later. He settled in peacefully to look after his widowed mother and his two younger sisters, aged ten and thirteen. He would sit on his porch and read the news from Vietnam.
Reno, whose family was very wealthy, went back to New York and attempted an acting career without success. Then he took up “serious figure skating” every day in the Central Park rink. While skating one day, he met a young nurse who worked in the cancer ward at Fordham Hospital.
“This is like Portrait of Jenny,” he told her. “Don’t grow up or we’re doomed.” She laughed and they dated and after a reticent courtship they married. Reno’s parents strongly objected: the girl, Maria, was Puerto Rican, a spawn of the slums. Reno was working on a play and they lived on her salary; his parents would not help. As it happened, Maria spent much of her salary on gifts for the patients in the ward: all of them were children, and of destitute parents. Reno thought it wonderful that she did so. One day Reno’s mother caught sight of Reno and Maria scavenging the sidewalks for cigarette butts, which they would cannibalize and use to roll their own. She had just come out of Bergdorf Goodman, and pretended not to see them. But after that his parents began to help.
Fromme merely drifted for a time, sleeping late while his wife, a Las Vegas casino cashier, provided their sole support, except for Fromme’s disability check. In the night he would awaken from sleep with a shout, unable to remember what it was that had frightened him in his dreams. His wife divorced him and married an air-conditioning salesman. Fromme was now working as a dealer at one of the major casinos on the strip. He was often criticized for being too friendly with the players.
One year after their discharge, both Nammack and Gomez attempted to reenlist but were rejected. Now Nammack tended bar on the island of Maui in Hawaii. Gomez had returned to civilian life to find that his fiancée had married. On the night of his rejection for reenlistment, Gomez became extremely and belligerently drunk and shot the former girlfriend’s husband on the doorstep of their home with his service .45. He was presently awaiting trial.
Bennish was director of public relations for a university in Los Angeles and was living quietly in the San Fernando Valley with a wife and one child, who was very precocious.
Krebs returned to the neurology staff of Sepulveda Veterans Hospital, where he had worked for several years until his assignment at the center. Christian married and left the corps. Groper had requested a combat assignment. It was granted. On the tenth of November, 1969, he was killed in action. He had deliberately thrown himself on top of a live grenade to prevent it from killing two young privates who were standing near it in a state of shock. He received the Con
gressional Medal of Honor, which was given to his mother in Pulaski, New York. She put it in a box with Groper’s letters.
About the Author
William Peter Blatty, the writer of numerous novels and screenplays, is best known for his mega-bestselling novel The Exorcist, deemed by the New York Times Book Review to be “as superior to most books of its kind as an Einstein equation is to an accountant’s column of figures.” An Academy Award winner for his screenplay for The Exorcist, Blatty is not only the author of one of the most terrifying novels ever written, but, paradoxically, also cowrote the screenplay for the hilarious Inspector Clouseau film, A Shot in the Dark. New York Times reviewers of his early comic novels noted, “Nobody can write funnier lines than William Peter Blatty,” describing him as “a gifted virtuoso who writes like S. J. Perelman.”
William Peter Blatty, The Ninth Configuration
(Series: # )
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