The Grasshopper King Read online

  “Professor?” the reporter said. “Relevance? We can edit this out.”

  “I don’t know,” I told her. “Luck, I guess.”

  “Well, we all need that, don’t we?” she said brightly. But annoyance had crept into her voice and I felt I knew her a little better.

  “I’m afraid I’m running late,” I said. This was a lie. I scooted around her and set off down the path. She followed me. So I put my head down and hurried away like a perpetrator. The cameras lumbered along behind us.

  “Any truth to the rumors that playboy multimillionaire Koiichi Kosugi will be unveiling a previously unknown Henderson work today?” She was matching my pace easily.

  “No comment,” I said, over my shoulder.

  “Do you yourself know what’s on the agenda?”

  “I don’t know any more than you do.”

  This was true.

  “One more thing,” she said. “Some of our viewers will remember you as the person present when the late Stanley Higgs broke his thirteen-year silence. Do you think Professor Higgs would be proud of this weekend’s activities here at CSU?”

  I sped up again, half-jogging now, my feet slipping alarmingly on the slushy path. Finally I was outdistancing the crew. It was the cameras that held them back. “No,” I said breathlessly, “comment.”

  The session was scheduled for one o’clock, but at twelve-fifteen, when I arrived, the hall was already half-full. I proceeded to my seat on the stage. Beneath me, the Henderson scholars filed in. In their neat progression down the rows of seats, in their scarves and flapped fur hats and Gore-Tex parkas buttoned over their noses and mouths, they looked like perplexed schoolchildren, called in on a day when class should by all rights have been canceled by the storm. But looking closer I saw that they couldn’t be mistaken for children at all: they were soft around the eyes, grayed and diminished. They looked, that is, like I felt. The shuffling, muttering sound of old men rose off them. I would not have been surprised at that moment to look down and see my own hands spotted and trembling, grooved with age.

  One by one the conferees settled into their empty seats and began tugging at their outerwear. The run-off from the piles of hats and coats made channels down each row to the soggy, mud-stamped carpet of the aisle.

  At the dot of one, Kosugi bounded onto the stage. I had thought his other suit was expensive; but this one was so black, so rich, that sitting behind him I felt I was looking through a rent into intergalactic space.

  “I’m very pleased to introduce today’s keynote speaker,” Kosugi said. He produced a massive grin. The scholars leaned forward.

  “Because it’s me!”

  Kosugi held up a gray sheaf of papers.

  “I am holding in my hand,” he said, “something of great interest to all of you—something I’ve obtained through no small effort and expense.”

  Not true, I knew. The manuscript had come to him in the mail, with a San Francisco postmark and no return address. All the money and time he’d spent had been in search of his mysterious benefactor. He’d come up with nothing.

  Kosugi laid the papers on the rostrum. He adjusted his astonishing suit.

  “Little Bug’s Son,” he began.

  Everyone knows the story of foolish Little Bug and his four wives, but most modern people have forgotten the important events that took place afterwards.

  Just weeks after the evil widow’s feast, even before all of Little Bug’s gnawed bones had been boiled down for soup, the wicked daughter, Clarissa, began to suspect for private reasons that all was not right. Before long it was obvious to everyone that Clarissa was with child by her late husband.

  “Kill it, mother! You must kill it at once!” cried Clarissa, upon realizing the frightful truth.

  “Silence!” the evil widow commanded. “Let me think. Possibly this misfortune may be turned to our advantage.”

  Indeed, the widow reasoned, the issue of her daughter’s brief marriage might well be a stroke of good luck. While Little Bug had indeed been delicious, she did not much like having to take up her share of the chores again. With a grandson, she might be released from work for the rest of her days.

  So Little Bug’s son was born, and grew quickly into a stout boy, who, having inherited his father’s suggestibility, uncomplainingly took over the chores from his evil grandmother, his wicked mother, and his two cruel uncles. The evil widow gave him the name You Boy, after the family’s manner of addressing him. Thanks to Clarissa’s blood, You Boy was a little cleverer than Little Bug had been, and so he was able to take over the cooking and the tax figures as well as the menial tasks of the farm. The evil widow and her family had never been happier.

  Meanwhile, not far away, a surprise had come to light. A district surveyor, chancing upon the abandoned farm of Little Bug’s grandmothers and grandfathers, had discovered a gigantic cache of silver coins, which the grandparents, in their wisdom, had amassed over their lifetimes. With the coins was a will, naming Little Bug as the rightful inheritor of the treasure.

  Soon, news of the great trove and the missing grandson reached the ears of the traveling salesman, who recognized at once that the heir must be the very man he had once advised as to the selection of a wife. He set off that same day for the evil widow’s farm to bring Little Bug the news of his good fortune.

  The evil widow invited the traveling salesman in for tea, thinking only to beat him senseless and take his walking-bag. But when she heard the story of Little Bug’s treasure, she realized that much greater gains were within her grasp.

  “Alas!” she cried, hiding her delight. “I do know the poor boy you speak of—he was my son-in-law! But, woe to us, he passed on not a day after he married my darling Clarissa.”

  And she collapsed in tears.

  Now the salesman, in his line of work, had developed a fine talent for distinguishing truth from falsehood; and although he did not trust the evil widow a bit, he sensed that what she had told him was not a lie.

  “Then Clarissa is heir to the fortune,” the salesman said reluctantly. “Let us go to the city, where I will bear witness that I saw Little Bug on your farm.”

  So they made ready to leave; but just then, You Boy, who, thanks to Clarissa’s blood, was a little cleverer than Little Bug had been, and who had all along been hiding in the wood cabinet, burst out into the room, filled with fury at the way the widow had tried to cheat him. He took up a fireplace poker and with one well-aimed swing knocked his grandmother’s head from her shoulders. The widow’s children rushed in at this noise; and the traveling salesman, having instantly perceived the true nature of the situation, drew his sword and ran Clarissa through the belly. Then You Boy and the traveling salesman chased down the two cruel sons, who had fled over the rise, and beat them to death with their fists.

  Afterwards, the two of them used the treasure to make themselves great lords. The salesman, who had brought the news of the inheritance to You Boy, became known as Speaker; and You Boy, who had concealed himself in silence, took the name Listener; these were the two first kings who founded the country of the Gravine. As for the evil widow and her two cruel sons and her wicked daughter, Clarissa, King Speaker and King Listener ate their flesh in a stew, then scattered their bones in every direction. Wherever one of the bones fell, another country sprang up, in which the people’s speech was confounded with lies and half-truths and words that could not be understood at all; and this is how the other parts of the world came to be.

  Late in the afternoon, after the day’s program had ended, after the scholars had dispersed to their medium-priced hotels, there came a quiet rapping on my office door.

  “Denise?”

  There was no answer. I felt quite sure now that I had misrecalled her name.

  “Come in,” I said wearily.

  It was not my secretary. In my doorway stood a tremendously old man, filthy, heaped with snow, hunched so sharply that his face was level with the knob. He looked as if he had been exposed to an experimental shrink
ing ray, still years away from readiness, which had acted more efficiently on his soft tissues than on his stubborn tall man’s skeleton. His skin was wrapped tight as parchment around the bones of his arms and hands; his ears were minuscule; his nose had retreated into his skull, leaving as reminder only a pair of labored, gasping openings above the trembling line of his mouth. He listed to one side, and his legs were bent under him—as if varying rates of contraction were beginning to pull him into an entirely new shape. His hair was gone. A dull, directionless hate embered in his eyes. I recognized him.

  “Henderson,” I said.

  He made no motion to correct me.

  “But they found you—”

  Henderson rolled his lips back and extended one yellowed finger at his mouth. It took me a moment to see what he meant. The gold crown. If it had been Henderson in the apartment they’d have found it in the wreckage of his head.

  Then who was the corpse? Some derelict, I supposed. It was easy to imagine Henderson dragging the body upstairs in a tied-off sack, feet first, with the dead man’s head banging on each step. As decrepit as he was he seemed wound around some undiminished strength. Possibly he’d killed the man himself.

  Possibly, I thought, he was here to kill me.

  I composed myself, rose from my chair.

  “It’s an honor to have you here,” I told him, in Gravinic, and extended my hand. By my choice of words and inflectional endings I had conveyed not only the sentiment above, but our difference in age and status, our previous unacquaintance, and the fact that the appositive predicate (“to have you here”) denoted an event for which I had waited for quite some time.

  Henderson looked down at my hand as if it contained a tawdry, offensive gift.

  “This is America. It is English. Bloody.”

  His voice, escaping from that shrunken mouth, was little more than a whistle. His accent was atrocious.

  “Walking us,” he said fiercely. He raised his hands to indicate outside.

  I stepped around my desk. “I’ll show you the sights. Good idea. You’ve come all this way.”

  Before we left I went to the closet and got out an oversized sweatshirt I never wore.

  “Here,” I told him. “It gets cold at night.”

  His thin polyester Oxford was soaked through with snow. He squinted down at the sweatshirt in his hands, then jerked it over his head. Stenciled across the sweatshirt was the legend, “PROPERTY OF CHANDLER STATE ATHLETIC DEPARTMENT—XXL.” He looked like someone’s hideous idea for a mascot.

  Outside the daytime was beginning to give way. The sun was an unpublicized presence behind the city skyline; the moon, gibbous, exposed itself intermittently between the clouds. At the horizon, where it was a little clearer, I could see the rising winter stars: Procyon, Sirius, and so on. Henderson was walking with me across the frozen ground. He held his arms in front of him as we went. I guessed his eyesight was going, or his sense of balance. He looked ready at any moment to drop to all fours.

  So far I’d been too surprised to be surprised—now it started to leak in, the unlikeliness of this, measurable in magnitudes I only knew the names of: milliards, googols. Something was required of me.

  “I never dreamed I’d really get to meet you,” I said.

  Henderson made a noise like this: “Hyeagh!”

  “You’re the most important poet of the century.”

  “Becch!” He spat a little crater in the snow.

  We came to the Moresby Center. There the ground sloped down as we approached the cliff. Henderson lost his footing once in the slush and grabbed my arm to keep from falling, with a grip as strong and consistent as a blood pressure cuff. The next day I’d find five bruises in a perfect ring around my elbow.

  I was wearing a heavy coat and a wool cap that pulled down over my ears, but my nose was running, and my eyes hurt from the cold. Henderson seemed unaffected by the weather—though his hands and face were bare. And our walk hadn’t winded him a bit. When we stopped the snow began accumulating on top of his bald head. I felt foolish for having given him the sweatshirt. For a moment it seemed eerily plausible that Henderson really was immortal; that he would just go on getting older, his skin stretching tighter over the concave places, his voice ever higher, ever quieter. He would construct a new seclusion and this time he would be careful to be unreachable by mail.

  Before us the Center jutted from the red earth like a nail through the back of a hand.

  “This is where Professor Higgs’s house used to be,” I told him.

  “It is a bastard,” Henderson said softly. He meant Higgs.

  “Maybe it is,” I said, not sure who I meant, or what. But my answer seemed to please him. He nodded.

  I thought I knew then what Henderson had come for. He wanted to know the truth about Higgs: the only person who had gotten to him. And I was the only person who had gotten to Higgs. So it fell to me to tell him.

  So I told him; so I told him everything. I had no idea what he might already know. I told Henderson about Higgs’s rise to academic prominence, his single-handed popularization of Henderson’s work, the basketball championship, the dentist’s letter, the one-sentence seminar, the order of baked potato, and Higgs’s subsequent retreat into silence. I proceeded to my own unpromising beginnings, getting along quickly to my accidental introduction to McTaggett and the Gravinic language, and my rapid conversion into an apprentice Gravinicist; then I moved to the outset of my employment. I described in detail the strange appointments of the Higgses’ basement, my initial antipathy toward Ellen and the manner in which it abated, once Julia joined the scene; the visits of Dr. Treech; Ellen’s provocative views about marriage; and our checker-playing habits. All this he listened to attentively, bringing close to me his tiny ear. I recounted my argument with Julia and the arrival of the Sethius letter, whose contents I paraphrased; then I came to the notice from the Society, the threat therein, the doctored photographs and the purchased judge, my inadvertent culpability, and our fevered, doomed efforts to convince Higgs to speak. At last I came to my scheme, my enlistment of Charlie Hascomb, my meticulous planning followed by my seemingly fatal omission; the nevertheless successful outcome; and finally, Higgs’s actual last words.

  “After he beat me,” I told Henderson, “he said ‘My game.’ And that was the last time I ever saw him.”

  I was dizzy and out of breath; I had hardly stopped talking in the half-hour since I’d begun the story. But I was also something close to overjoyed. My secret, now that I was unburdened of it, seemed laughable and puny—that was what I’d been carrying around so long? I thought of a picture I’d seen in a textbook, the month I’d been pre-med: a tumor in a bottle, snipped out of someone’s lung, just a moist, gray, unimposing clump, harmless now that it was on its own. Henderson had released me, just as I, maybe, had released Higgs; and now, like Higgs, I could do what I pleased. I could leave if I wanted, and never come back. History I could abandon to Henderson and the leaders of men, his unwitting stooges—no one would know the difference.

  The windows of the Center were still mostly lit. The offices were stacked in alternating rows like cells in a stalk. Behind each rectangle of light there was a chemist, a dramatist, a creative writer, an anthropologist, or something else. Our Babel, I thought, this welter of disciplines, our own bituminous tower. Something had gone wrong; the confounding of the tongues had proceeded on schedule but the victims had failed to scatter, as intended, across the span of the earth. So the tower had been completed. At the building’s base, bulldozers trundled across the clay like slow beetles, moving piles of earth from one spot to another, to undiscernable purposes. There were annexes in store: more Centers built to this one’s plan, more people’s names to be honored and preserved.

  I imagined the world advanced a hundred years. I was dead, my name forgotten; this was the central comforting fact. The city was all towers, bristling at the sky like a dusty bed of spikes. Tip Chandler had torn himself loose again. Now he was face down in the
clay. Names filed past me, a catalogue. Julia was dead, my parents too. Ellen was long dead. Charlie, McTaggett, Slotkin, Treech: dead, dead, dead, dead. Higgs was dead.

  But for now I was not dead, only dead-to-be; there was just the one tower; it was almost unequivocally nighttime. Down on the plain, the cities were blinking on. Henderson let my arm go. Everything preternatural about the moment had fled, leaving me an ordinary exhaustion, and a pained relief like the slumping down after a long run. Behind me, in town, people were fixing dinner, watching me on the six o’clock news.

  “Well?” I asked Henderson. “Seen enough?”

  I still thought he might reveal something to me; there was so much that was still shaded; but of course it would not have been Henderson’s way to explain everything. Or anything. He had what he’d come for.

  “Then let’s go,” I said.

  And he was gone; he sped away from me on his spindly legs, skipping over the snow like a waterbug, faster, I found, than I could follow. I saw my sweatshirt disappear over the rise.

  The next morning I bought my ticket to New York.

  It’s amazing: the way this denatured, anonymous room (my off-white sepulchre) has in five days’ time become manifestly my own, and all it took was this stack of two-hundred-some sheets of hotel letterhead stacked on the chilly formica of the desk. My finished pages I keep at my left hand—sound familiar? And at my right, the shrinking pile of blank paper. When the pile runs out I call the porter. I’ve run out five times so far. Each time I tell him how much more I’ll need, and each time he arrives with the same forty pages.

  “Sorry, sir,” he says. “House policy.”

  It’s no such thing. Each time he comes up here he gets a dollar. Good business—I applaud him. He’ll go far.

  The last time he came up he asked me what I was writing.