The Grasshopper King Page 22

  They’re not bad, all these theories I read about: they make sense, they fit with what we know, they have constituencies we can only marvel at, and if they have no proof, well, neither do we. Remove Henderson and the world might be unrecognizable; but then again it might be exactly the same. It’s circumstantial, what we do. In this way all historians are alike. We’re right, and all the others wrong—that’s the only difference. Each year it seems a smaller one.

  My life settled into a spare, periodic state. I woke each morning at quarter to seven, drank two tumblerfuls of orange juice and ate a carton of yogurt; then listened to the day’s news on the radio—Ellen’s legacy, that habit—while I brushed my teeth and shaved, and was ready to leave at thirty-five past. I returned home at five-fifteen and ordered a pizza for dinner. (Even the Greek and his egg salad had left town.) After that I would work for five more hours, arrange my papers for the next day, shower, floss, and fall asleep without incident. My dreams were reassuringly conventional, tending toward boundless vistas, gliding, conversations in which I was not immediately involved. I often saw columns of figures and dates.

  It seemed to me I had achieved a modest sort of pinnacle: a perfectly unmarked, unremarkable existence. My world was a closed system of which I had an absolute understanding. I knew what went where and what served what purpose. Higgs had been right about marriage: you couldn’t be too careful. Another person, however closely aligned to my own temperament, would inevitably have introduced perturbations into my routine—noise, one could say, in the signal—and I had begun to value quiet above all else. I had accumulated a great store of it. A girl came by twice each week, once to pick up my laundry, again to bring it back along with the meager groceries I needed: soap, skim milk, toilet tissue, rat traps. The girl was seventeen or so, heavy-chested and sullen, but not dull; she learned quickly not to speak to me, and that one knock was enough. I changed faculty meetings from weekly to monthly, then eliminated them altogether. No one complained. When I did have to talk to someone—my typist, my undergraduates—I grew furious at the slow approximateness of speech.

  I often thought of Higgs as I ate my nightly pizza. There were still those who speculated about his silence; but that was not what I was doing. I knew the truth now. There was really, in the end, no alternative to silence—so I told myself, with a certain tired satisfaction, as I lifted my oiled, grainy fingers one by one to my mouth. Each of my fingertips was stained a cheery, burned-looking red. There was nothing to say. There was just nothing to say. I supposed I had turned out much like the other professors after all—their nervous habits just beginning to make themselves known in me like a familiar syndrome—and while it was not the life I had planned for myself, it was, in its way, a rich one; and I had chosen it.

  My serenity was disturbed only once: that was the day I received Miss Amanezar’s letter. I had always casually imagined that Higgs and I would see each other again, would compare notes in the safety of reminiscence, like high-school reunion guests confessing their erstwhile crushes and their never-punished pranks. As ludicrous as this fantasy was, I found I felt a little remorse at seeing it finally torn down. When I was finished reading I slipped the letter into the drawer where I kept my personal correspondence (that is, my mail from Julia) and put it from my mind. Before me on the desk was a stack of Belgian deeds of trust, with which I meant to demonstrate that a certain acquaintance of Henderson’s had, in the early 1950s, been in a position to influence administrative policies as regarded the Congo. But I couldn’t concentrate. I was beset by thoughts of Higgs, of the farce we’d played out, of Julia and Ellen; then I found myself wholly occupied by the task of not thinking of these things. The Flemish street names broke up, recombined, a dancing grid of diphthongs; hopeless. I took out the letter and read it again. A better place . . .

  I decided—and I shouldn’t have to say how momentous this was—to go out for a walk.

  I was not surprised to find myself heading for the campus, and, once on the campus, toward the cliff. I came to the site of Higgs’s house. It was already two years since it had been demolished—but I’ll say more about that later. Now there was a gigantic cubical absence where the house had been. It was to be the foundation for the Moresby Research Center. At the bottom of the pit, a few distant workers were hacking dispiritedly at objects I could not make out in the hazy dimness of the afternoon. The red, scrubby hole looked like an outsized grave, like the graves the Russians were digging for Soviet statues. I’d heard about it on the radio: they had to lower them in with cranes, the hewn-out commissars and their deputies, wet-cheeked like ikons, but with vodka, from the bottles the crowds tossed at their clumsy granite heads. The onlookers lined the hole like the edge of a parade, shivering, cheering each smashed bottle, as the cold gusts of freedom whipped their threadbare coats around. But for Higgs, I thought gloomily, there’d been no one—no one but Miss Amanezar and whatever docile patients she’d conducted to the Pinellas County burying ground. I burned on his behalf at the placid, cotton-mouthed devotions she must have seen him off with. There was nothing he would have hated more—he the insister on precision, the enemy of every empty word—than to be subject, in his last aboveground moments, to the exhausted and puerile shaggy-dog jokes Miss Amanezar called prayers; and poor Higgs’s boxed-up corpse, in every last case the painful, obvious punchline. Nobody deserved that. Not even the living.

  Beside me on a broad picket sign was an artist’s depiction of the Moresby Center as it would look when finished. The building was a windowed taper standing on the cliffside, matter-of-fact as a stalagmite, surrounded by impressionistic renderings of trees, cars, and students. Beneath the drawing was a list of the departments that had won a coveted space: chemistry would be housed there, and agricultural science, Spanish, creative writing, and drama, some branches of history. Anthropology, of course. I thought there was something a little belligerent about the building, its solitary height. To me it looked like the college, fed up at last, lifting a middle finger to the plain.

  I turned away from the yellow safety rope. I felt skittish, inclined to bolt; but I was not yet ready to go home. Whatever impulse had brought me there wasn’t satisfied. I walked away from the cliff, toward the forest path, and in a few minutes I had arrived at the statue of Tip Chandler. To my surprise—how long had it been?—the founder stood upright. The patina was scrubbed off, too, and he was circled with a waist-high fence. I supposed they didn’t want people sitting on him now. On a stone at my feet a bronze plaque was inset: “HE LOOKED AT THE DESERT AND SAW ATHENS.” I looked at Chandler. In his new posture he had lost the embarrassed dignity I had always liked him best for. Now he seemed serious, a believer, a little scary to be close to—much as he must have been in life.

  Next I went to the classroom in Gunnery Hall where I had stumbled on McTaggett’s class. The door was locked, and pressing my face against the grilled rectangle of glass I saw that the room had been converted for storage. It was row after row of prefab shelving now. Cardboard cartons, overflowing with printout, were heaped in the aisles. I abandoned campus and headed into town. The Tooth and Nail was still there, but inside it was unrecognizable. There were stucco partitions everywhere, and the lighting was pure white and sourceless, as in an art museum. At one end of the bar a group of wide-shouldered young men in business dress were arguing talmudically about the rules of Canadian football, as the Canadians tussled and disported on the big screen above them. Near the entrance, thin-faced girls stood in a circle, sucking at mixed drinks, planning something. I backed out.

  My last stop was the coffee shop I had used to frequent with McTaggett, and where I had met Charlie again. I was hardly surprised to find it replaced by a Grape Arbor franchise. I bought a cup of coffee and sat down at the counter. Here it is, I thought: ordinary life. I gave my neighbors a covert once-over, assigning to each a set of circumstances. The natty gentleman at the far end of the counter I felt to be a salesman of luxury cars; the woman at his side was a traveling executive
who’d share his room tonight; then there was a hard-hat; a defrocked priest; a pair of angry youths; a folksinger; and next to me, communing defeatedly with a cruller, a hobo. None of them knew a word of Gravinic. If, through some absurd mischance, they were to hear it spoken, they would not even recognize it as a language; it would be just gibberish, even the boundaries between words impossible to make out, a hash of phonemes, babble, baby-talk. Higgs was dead. And it seemed to me that his death had propelled me into a subtly revised version of the world, one in which his long silence had never been broken; or perhaps there had never been a silence at all, or even a Higgs. Why else would everything connected to my secret be excised? I wondered whether my apartment was still there. A mad suspicion gripped me that an atlas, in this new world, would not even show the Gravine. In its place there would only be the careful stippling of landform, or a legend indicating scale.

  “Are you drinking that?” the hobo asked me. “It’s gonna get cold.”

  I met his eyes, startled; and as I did I was struck full on by a vision of his solitary life, knocking hopefully at the back doors of farmhouses, huddled under straw in the corner of a freight car, pursuing something unguessable back and forth, east and west along the rails. He used what he needed and answered to nobody. He was my double! I felt like taking him by the shoulders, bursting into tears, calling him brother; but even in my agitated state I knew I was incapable of making such a scene.

  Instead I leaned toward him and said, “I understand you”—trying to inject into that phrase as much as I could of my desperate comradeship.

  The hobo nodded, tranquil. He placed his hand nearer my cup.

  “You’re not the first person to tell me that,” he said.

  I left the hobo my coffee and waded out into the crowded, twilit avenue. People pushed by me, muttering darkly; car horns went off. Across the street a man dressed as a steer was handing out coupons for a steakhouse. It was a far cry from Athens. But then, I thought, where was Athens now? These days I supposed they had municipal buses there, and pickpockets and flower shops and a bickering local government like any other city. The shrines to philosophy and art had all been broken up and carted off, stone by stone, to air-conditioned museums and the vast backyards of the wealthy. Time had worn the statues down to noseless anonymity. Maybe it was inevitable that it should happen that way.

  The traffic carried me toward home, and when I arrived at the old warehouse I found that my apartment was still there, the same as I had left it. My pizza box still rested open on the table; next to it sat Miss Amanezar’s letter, and the promotional brochure. I put them back in the drawer. The Belgian deeds awaited me at my desk. I let the familiarity of my surroundings rise up and over me like a warm pool; my terrifying glimpse of the world outside my circumscription began to recede; and as the sun slipped gasping below the line of buildings, I sat down again to work.

  Four years later, a pair of London policemen, responding to complaints from a small convoy of collection agencies, hacked down the door to a Fleet Street flat and found a body that had been dead for a long time. The putrefaction was so far advanced that one of the constables had to rush from the room, eyes smarting, to throw up. When the stronger-stomached one, left to carry out the official procedures by himself, tried to turn the corpse’s face up, the jaw sloughed off and a vile, lumpy fluid gushed over his hand. He didn’t have time to run; he just crouched in the corner and coughed his breakfast out.

  The apartment, aside from its occupant, was perfectly empty. There was no furniture but the bed and a low table, no books, no toiletries—no sign, that is, that the man who lived there had done anything in decades but eat and sleep. On the center of the table sat the empty envelope in which Higgs had sent his letter, forty years before.

  “The deceased appears not to have been tampered with,” the policeman wrote in his report. “No identifying marks. No evidence of foul play.”

  Downstairs, the other constable wiped his lips. A grandmotherly Indian had let him use her sink.

  “But why on earth didn’t you report the odor?” he asked her.

  “The odor?”

  “The odor of the . . . deceased. From upstairs. Didn’t you find it suspicious?”

  “Not a bit,” the woman said.

  “How can that be?”

  She shook her head, frowned with what looked to be infinite patience; for the stupid world, its stubbornness.

  “It’s smelled like that for thirty years.”

  So Henderson was dead, and as if that weren’t bad enough my telephone kept ringing. The calls started in the morning, and kept up through the following day, and the next; first people calling to see if I knew, then to make sure that I knew, then, assuming that I knew, asking what I was going to do about it. Do about it? I tried to be polite, though I hardly remembered how. The appropriate formulas came to my lips only slowly, and emerged with the inflections all flattened out and wrong, as if I’d memorized them syllable by syllable. By the time I went home I was exhausted to trembling.

  On the third day, when the hubbub had largely died down (it was just the outliers now, lonely one-man Gravinics departments in Singapore and Perth refusing to accept they’d been the last to know), my most recent secretary came into my office to tell me that someone was waiting outside.

  “He’ll have to make an appointment,” I said. “That’s the system.”

  The system was that when people called for appointments, my secretary put them off—repeatedly, if necessary. In this way I avoided seeing almost everyone.

  “I know,” she said. “But he’s come from Japan.”

  “McTaggett?” I said hopefully. She shook her head. “His name is Kosugi,” she said.

  “Oh,” I said, suddenly without the will or vigor to resist. “Send him in. Thank you, Denise.”

  My secretary lingered a little longer in the doorway. I looked down uncomfortably. Oh, God, I thought, wasn’t her name Denise?

  “I just wanted to say I was sorry about Henderson.”

  She cast her eyes down at her headset mike. For the first time I noticed that she was not pretty.

  “OK,” I said.

  She slipped out the door and in a moment was replaced by Koiichi Kosugi. It had been many years since I’d seen him. He was treeish and stern, wide through the shoulders, and his business suit was of a deep, expensive blue. Kosugi had spent the last decade throwing himself into ludicrous business ventures from which he had emerged, time after time, unruined; all the while adding to his collection of Hendersonia, now the largest in the world. Henderson’s littering citation was in his hands, and several rare first drafts—rare because Henderson so seldom wrote second drafts.

  “Mr. Kosugi,” I said resignedly. “What can I do for you?”

  He wheeled away from me so that the great tailored drape of his suit billowed at me like a map of the open sea.

  “The Immortal Henderson!” he boomed.

  “Died,” I said. “I know.”

  “Is the name of the conference you’re having. Starting December sixteenth. The ninety-fifth birthday.”

  “Would-have-been birthday.”

  “Don’t stop me. I’m paying, so no difficulty with that. You just need to notify everyone. And arrange for the hall. Are we settled?”

  “This is sudden. Even if we do agree to go ahead.”

  “Let me worry about that.”

  “Then can I ask—”

  He turned to face me. “OK. Ask.”

  “Why?”

  He put his hands deep, deep in the pockets of his blue, blue suit.

  “I found something,” he said.

  The morning the conference was to begin, a morning out of which wet snow dropped limply to the red, chopped earth of the campus, I was met on my way to Gunnery Hall by a local television crew. Their leader was a small-boned and purposeful blonde whose face, as I approached, resolved into a mask of professional interest. I recognized her, though I never watched television. She was always riding in par
ades.

  “Professor Grapearbor,” she said, squarely in my way. “Got a minute for the six o’clock news?”

  “One minute,” I said.

  She made a curt, unreadable signal to the cameraman, who was slouching behind me on the path, chewing gum. He trudged over to his camera, which was covered with a tarp to keep the snow off. A red light lit.

  “That’s right, Tom,” said the reporter. “And it’s all right here in Chandler City, where eggheads and experts from here to Tokyo have gathered to pay tribute to one of literature’s all-time greats. I’m here with Chandler State’s own Professor Samuel Grapearbor, a Henderson authority. Professor, would you describe this conference as a civic coup for Chandler City?”

  “No comment,” I said.

  She looked at me oddly.

  “I mean yes.”

  “According to experts,” she went on, “Henderson, who died this year in London at the age of ninety-four, has left us a long-lasting legacy. Professor, how is it that his poems are still relevant to us today?”

  That they’d been relevant even at their writing was news to me. I wondered what experts she’d consulted. I searched for some response that would not make me seem a fraud, or a hopeless rube.

  The cameraman made an impatient circle with his hand, catching my eye. He pointed at the camera lens: look here. I obeyed. I had read somewhere that in order to appear relaxed on television one was supposed to imagine the faces of the viewers across the glass, to make a sort of conversation out of it. Try as I might, I couldn’t do it: couldn’t make up arbitrary faces. And I needed a backdrop—where would people be, at six o’clock? In living rooms? Kitchens? The Tooth and Nail, maybe, watching the big screen? Were they together or alone? Decent or in-? Were they even paying attention? Or were they occupied in something else while they waited for the weather to come on? How was I supposed to make all these decisions? It was ordinary life again, that enduring and intractable mystery. I didn’t think I was getting any more relaxed.