You'll get the items this afternoon, Dr. Prentice whispered to me.
Andrew took me to a café where he was known, for he wanted them to put cognac in my coffee.
I never said an improper word to her, he told me, staring into his own coffee.
I know, I said. I knew the nation loved her.
Even Great Uncle, said Andrew with stricken eyes. He knew the score. But he wouldn't punish her.
Soon McBrien turned up, father-to-be, splendid looking in his suit. Andrew and I gathered ourselves together to face him. It occurred to me he had often been edgy when a writer, but he was smooth now. In my shock, he looked to me like a visitor from a remote place—the morning's experiences had driven him out of mind. Not even when grave robbing had I remembered his unborn child. Now he would need to be informed about the morning's dark work.
To my vast relief, Andrew said, I've filled Matt in. On this morning. You don't have to explain anything to him.
McBrien touched my arm. A good idea, he said, nodding a lot. Now you have a choice of texts, don't you?
Yes.
Steinbeck or Achebe. Hemingway or Ben Okri.
I believe that at Kennedy's instructions the waiter was being more generous with me in pouring our laced coffee than he was with the others. I receded from my friends, swept away from them, a little bit like a passenger on a train, listening to the diminishing and less and less comprehensible best wishes of those on the platform. I was already dense-headed and neutralized by liquor when Louise James entered in her good American weeds. Some of the older men in the place, I could tell even tipsy, disapproved of her on principle, but their disapproval had an erotic edge to it as well. It was the willingness of women of her class to drink coffee on equal terms with men in such places as this which gave coffeehouses a bad name with plain folk and rural Intercessionists.
Alan, she said. I hope you're feeling well.
Kennedy's got me half drunk, I said, but with a smile.
Why not? asked Andrew. The boy has had an awful morning. Let's get something to eat. Some kabobs or something.
I barely participated in the conversation after Louise James sat down. It was a little like listening to clever people on the far side of a wall. Sometimes, out of reflex comradeship, I smiled when they laughed.
The food came, and tea. At some stage Andrew Kennedy asked us to excuse him—he obviously intended to visit the lavatory.
I'll join you, said McBrien, his tie undone.
Suddenly Louise James's large eyes were upon me and she spoke like a doctor diagnosing a case. I have the cure, she promised. I've thought about it at some length. For years in fact. Why don't we go ahead with marriage, Alan?
Why would you want to? I asked, frowning in distaste.
We would be a good alliance. I am now a New World woman. I am permitted to make the first move.
She beamed at that idea. We choose our husbands, and I have chosen you. I will save you from grief.
Grief? I asked, uncomprehending.
Yes. Of course, only in so far as I can. But I'll make you a happy home. Did you think you were never going to marry again?
Yes.
Well, she said. Perhaps you could expand your thoughts.
Do you know what happened this morning?
She frowned now. No.
I've just robbed my wife's grave.
Robbed?
I shook my head, knowing that of course I could not tell more. Let it go, I urged her. The thing is, you don't know anything about me.
I read your stories. They are classics. De Maupassant, Katherine Mansfield, Alice Munro, Grace Paley. You're everything they are.
You can't tell a man by his short stories, I warned her. That's a stupid mistake. That's the sort of mistake undergraduates make.
But then, what other criteria should I apply? Are you attracted to me at all? You seemed to be when we were younger.
No. I'm sorry, but I'm not attracted to anyone.
But you could be. It's only natural. I will take you out to America in the end. Because this is barren.
You won't take me to America. I don't want you to say anything else.
I love you, she assured me. I know you from your noble stories, I saw the way you operate. You saved me a lot of embarrassment by being brave enough to confront me back then.
Brave. I spoke the word only to mock it. You're interested in me because I'm a hapless figure. You think I can be made less sullen, that I'll be improved in your golden aura.
Ah, she said. I have an aura, do I? That's something.
She considered this issue for a while. I'm certainly impressed by the depth of your mourning. That's characteristic of you. But it's a price Sarah wouldn't want you to pay.
My mourning had now become so complicated by the day's treachery that I couldn't contest or debate that.
I said, I won't be marrying again soon, if ever. And I won't be leaving here.
Your grief is really like a pure flame, she told me.
Don't say that, I warned her. It isn't true. Besides, it sounds so American.
Oh no, she said. It is precisely from here, from the fourteenth-century love poets. You're mourning in the national spirit.
She thought about this, and added, I doubt I could ever marry an American. She shrugged. I tried. I was once engaged to one.
You should have pressed on with it, I told her.
No, no. It was silliness on both our parts.
I had a chance to laugh. And this isn't, I suppose?
I'll stay here if you insist on it. In this country. By your side. I'm just warning you of genuine intentions. I just want you to know that there's a life ahead of you.
By now, I was in closer touch to what I thought of as the real world—it was at least twenty minutes since my last cognac. Three or four meetings when I was young, I commented. And three meetings this time. That's all we've had. Fast work even for a New World woman, Ms. James.
She smiled, full-lipped, and I could see in an abstract way that the smile had all the right ingredients for wifedom.
Kennedy and McBrien came back full of joviality from the men's lavatory.
We'll get you home, Alan, said Andrew. A last order?
I demanded one more coffee, and McBrien joined me in it, as Andrew and Louise James discussed John Updike's Rabbit trilogy. Andrew argued it was overrated by the standards of world literature—couldn't, for example, hold a candle to Márquez.
That's comparing apples with pears, Louise James argued. I don't want to pull the I've-been-there trick, but if you live in the United States, it's astonishing how those books of Updike's get the essence of the experience, all the desperation beneath the gestures of affluence. And all the sexual despair. I don't think your average Mediationist farmer or Intercessionist peasant feels any such thing. Yet all of America seems to. It's as if they believe what is normal and human are all some unachievable magic.
Intercessionist peasants prey on their own nieces, said Andrew with a smile. And then, with an onset of gentlemanly coyness, revised what he had said. No, I know that's our stereotype of them. I get your point. If you don't have to despair about your life, if the refrigerator's full of food and you're going to live to seventy or more, I suppose there's leisure to think about these things. Would you say, he pursued, that in our world survival is the difficult achievement, and in America human intimacy is?
That's exactly what I'd say.
McBrien and Andrew, progressives though they might be, were slightly shocked by her explicitness about what was eating America. For me, of course, the main issue remained the parched and hollowed visage of my dead wife, whose muteness said, What you give, you take back. She had gone back into the earth, I imagined, as the thwarted bride who merely wants to turn her face to nothingness. That could never be forgotten by me. To hell with whether Updike was up to strength with Márquez! To hell with whether Americans had leisure to spend their conscious hours on their own loneliness! To hell with Louise James's s
entimental intentions! McBrien and I said good-bye to her, and to Andrew. Andrew told me to call him at any hour if I wanted anything.
When I was driven home, I saw the familiar Toyota. So habituated had I become to the Overguard, and they to me, that they waved as I went inside, helped by McBrien.
On the stairs McBrien murmured, I'll stay with you till Prentice sends the manuscript. Let me make you tea.
Yes, but I'll need someone to come in and download the disk on my hard drive. They'll have to unglue the A-drive for once.
Sure, he said.
Once it's been done, they can glue it up again.
Sure, he said appeasingly. We're going to make it, aren't we?
Yes, I said. Three or four days' revision.
You need vodka?
No.
We reached the door, and he helped me with the key. He said, It mightn't be the right thing to say, given the day it is. But Louise James adores you. When this is over, we wouldn't feel badly if . . .
If what?
Well, he said. As they say in American novels—consenting adults.
I said, It isn't the day to say so, Matt. I've just robbed my wife's grave.
Nonsense, said McBrien. Sarah would have been happy.
Oh yes? She was an honorable woman in a way you wouldn't begin to guess, Matt. And the dead are stricter than the living.
At three o'clock, while both of us were dozing, an Overguard technician arrived. McBrien explained to him as I roused myself, Mr. Sheriff needs to use the A-drive for a second or two to transfer material.
That was all right, the technician answered, but he would have to stay here and take away with him any disks I used in the process.
Have some tea, McBrien told him and settled him in a seat by my desk.
The package was delivered late in the afternoon. McBrien took delivery of it at the door and brought it to me at my desk. Wait, he told the messenger. We've got to make sure it's all here.
I opened the envelope and there, wrapped in plastic stamped with the word AUTOCLAVED, were the pages and the disks.
I opened them in turn with a deliberate briskness and callowness. They felt drier than the leaves of a dead tree. The business had been done, title to the work had been exchanged if not stolen. I owed it to her to be functional now. I had seen her mute and decayed reproach, but having done my worst, I pressed on matter-of-factly with the minor features of the crime.
Will you go into another room, please? the technician asked. Clearly there must have been some program hidden deep in the computer with a code which he must now use. When he called us back, he had removed the metallic gag from the mouth of the A-drive. A metal tongue the same size as a disk was also extracted.
Do your download, he told me.
I transferred the files of my novel, which had survived all that they had been subjected to, onto the hard drive. As each one came up I got the crazed idea I should write to the disk manufacturer. Their product had endured a lonely and buried test.
Finished doing it and checking the results, I thanked the technician, and McBrien and I returned to the kitchen while he reapplied the gag.
Then he said good-bye and was gone.
I opened up the pages, to compare with the computer text.
You can go now, Matt, I told him. After a small and somehow mutually reassuring argument, he did.
I rose, drank tea, then returned to the screen and brought up the first twenty-page file. Then I took up the manuscript, from which I would work, entering changes onto the laptop. So I reasserted myself, with a strange ease and lack of nostalgia, into the pages written in a golden time. I barely adjusted the more notable attacks the book made on the regime, so taken with the sanctions was this material. Suffering, in the eyes of those who go through it, is often an apolitical experience. It debases subtlety of thought, and I talked at least in part about the sort of people to whom suffering came not so much as a result of policy but from the hand of God, as something to be accepted. My central characters, the Clancys, however, understood the politics thoroughly, and that made their survival, at least through most of the book's pages, more admirable.
There was enough of my old self left to enjoy the final gloss of my lost book, to make my work quick, and to cause me to renounce drunkenness. With my dear book back, grief was forgotten for at least ninety seconds at a time. In a curious way I felt a species of relief at having decided the issue. I was done in five days.
The last paragraphs read:
Having said good-bye to the last funeral guest, old Mr. Sayers, who still hankered for the monarchy but loved Clancy, Rose Clancy walked back into the room empty except for the presence of her husband, the being designated to occupy this day in this century with a death more inflicted than natural. She reentered like a visitor the room where he lay and took a seat in a corner chair, not in any of the chairs of honor overlooking the head of his ceremonial bier, the white satin with which his past life was honored. I'll have to get all these borrowed-in chairs returned to the neighbors tomorrow, she reminded herself, and wondered how she could manage it.
He'd have it done in half an hour, of course. He'd organize the street kids. Such energy, she said aloud. Such energy!
All expended too. He had been one of the officers brave enough to demonstrate against the king and his ignorant and sybaritic son. He had door-knocked to motivate people to be on the streets in protest against the unexpected cowardice of presidents tamed by the CIA and the British Foreign Office. Then war and imprisonment, and more door knocking. At a humble level, on a level so low that politicians might need a microscope to see him, Clancy had summoned up the people's unease, leaving her side after the evening meal, leaving his children with stories unread and untold. Knocking on the wooden doors of poor adobe houses whose wiring was risky and whose walls eroded, saying, Come! Speak! Be heard!
But those forty years of urgings had swallowed him. The West had decreed that for his cough he should not have antibiotics; for the pounding of his aged blood, he could not have beta blockers; the world had punished him for every rat-tat-tat. His arteries contracted, the wheeze deepened and became systemic, the blood grew too weighty for his veins. Hardening to a pebble, it blocked the traffic between heart and brain.
She stood up. He who had been so particular and natty in youth had become a stubbly corpse. In the week before his death, he had not been able to acquire a razor blade or afford a barber. Not only had the world cut off from Clancy his panaceas, but the means to make himself an acceptable corpse as well. So Mrs. Clancy sat like a late caller by her husband's corpse, weighed by the mystery of why the world had punished her honest, earnest husband.
I called in McBrien, and he turned up with a printer and read the material as the pages came off it. Oh Alan! he'd say occasionally.
And sometimes he'd say, Implied criticism of government here.
He'll just have to live with that, I would reply airily.
McBrien had tears in his eyes when he finished. This is good, he said. This is the book we wanted.
You mean it gets us out of the crisis.
He laughed. That's exactly what I mean. But this is a really good book.
By the standards of Márquez?
Fuck Márquez! said McBrien. He never got me out of hot water. There are a few literals.
I told him to mark them up and I'd fix them. I spent the afternoon and evening doing that, while he took the printer away. I felt no acute discomfort anymore. I watched television. I hoped they would let me go back to subtitling now.
I slept like a child, but not an innocent one.
In the morning I heard McBrien and Captain Chaddock ascending the stairs, chatting like normal citizens. The tension had eased. You could tell from their voices. They were near a fair end to an assignment. Chaddock followed McBrien into the apartment. He carried a steel box. Won't keep you, he said. A pickup. How are you, sir?
One day, it was rumored, the Overguard would rise and slaughter Great Uncle i
n the manner in which Praetorians had slaughtered Roman emperors. Once more, it was hard to imagine Chaddock in such a role. He packed the manuscript into the steel box and made me sign a receipt.
McBrien also had something for me to sign.
I've been in contact with Great Uncle's office, he told me quietly. They're delighted, particularly since you're two days early. I'm told Great Uncle himself has set aside a day to read it and have it read to him by relays of men, and read by Pearson Dysart. I wonder would you mind signing this, all three copies?
He had taken from an envelope three typed pages.
He told me, They're all the same.
Each of them had at the top of the page the word DISAVOWAL. The text read:
I have heard with some shock the rumor that the book published in the United States as has been attributed to myself instead of its true author, President Stark. I seek in the most emphatic terms to disavow any association with this well-known book. As happy as I would be to claim any part of its authorship, I find the denial of credit to President Stark to be malicious, and obviously politically motivated.
In case of any future controversy, McBrien told me.
I signed all three. And why not? The exhumation of Sarah had rendered me amoral. An Overguard came in and took away my computer. Then Chaddock chatted to me as his men gently searched my apartment for any form of facsimile. When I say gently, I mean that they opened drawers soundlessly, they sifted through them with their fingers, they flung nothing upon the floor. Chaddock told me, Something we've got to do. Won't be a moment. We'll be round for the next few days but be off your back soon!
For the next day and a half, apart of course from sleeping hours, I sat in a café overdosing on foreign newspapers. On the second evening, looking out across the river, I was working my way through an amusingly Tory article in the Spectator. It was one of those British magazines which makes a reader forget where they are, and positions them very solidly in a certain procrustean version of London. When I was finished, I put the magazine back in its rack for the next coffee-drinker-cum-reader and went out into the night. I have to confess that, in a reduced way, I felt very much alive. A cleansing wind from the east had taken the dust and pollution back towards the desert, and the stars which had always shone over our ancient river, over emperors and kings and presidents with roughly the same result, were sharply delineated. They seemed to reassure me in the idea that I'd got the worst out of the way, as had they. The big bang was over for both of us. We knew all about the violent universe. Now we glimmered in our cold isolation.