The Grasshopper King Read online

  “You gotta call Higgs,” he said. He handed me a beery scrap of paper with a telephone number on it.

  “Who’s Higgs?” I asked him, but he had vanished into the crowd. A rhythmic chant set in: Go! Go! Go! Go! And nothing would have pleased me better than to go. But the men in the circle were by and large large, much more so than I, and I did not believe I had much chance of breaking through. So I picked up the phone. At this, the crowd grew quiet. I dialed the number and after three rings a woman answered, not Hello? but Yes? Behind her there was country music playing.

  “I was wondering if I could please speak to Mr. Higgs,” I said weakly. I realized I sounded even drunker than I was. I had no idea what I might say next. But the woman just put down the phone.

  “She hung up,” I said, turning to my audience, managing a smile. And the crowd swept over me, pounded my back, handed me a beer, within seconds forgot about me. My acquaintance found me just as I reached the front door.

  “You’re a lock,” he said. “They loved you.” But I never went back.

  My project throughout the winter and spring was to translate a collection of Gravinian nursery rhymes into English. These were different from the little verses I had known as a child; they were more like aphorisms, or, speaking loosely, haiku. Most of them concerned a character named Little Bug, a generalized figure of youth and folly. There was one of these that stuck doggedly in my mind. In Gravinic it formed a series of perfect dactyls, which by an unfortunate chance coincided exactly with the endless TACK-eta of something inside our radiator; so I seemed always to be hearing it, whenever the nights got cold. My English version of the rhyme went as follows:

  Little Bug, Little Bug, my son Little Bug,

  It is time to do your lessons for school,

  Hurry, hurry, hurry, Little Bug!

  Or Mama will throw you to the jackals.

  This was typical. Gravinian nursery rhymes were all alike in their earnest didacticism, their brevity, and their termination in sudden, usually unpleasant surprises. As I shouldn’t need to point out by this time, my translation fails to capture the full meaning of the source text. The original, for instance, strongly implies that the jackals in line 4 are not a vague and distant threat, but rather a specific set of jackals, probably nearby, very possibly inside the house. In English all this is lost—and with it, I think, the verse’s special charm.

  Late in May, as the term and my desultory college career limped to a close, the Department of Gravinics held a party. It was the first pleasant day after a week of rain and threats of rain. I’d been told to come at 2:00; when I arrived, with Julia in tow, at quarter-past, the party was already well underway. The whole of the faculty was spread out across the patchy lawn. I pointed them out to Julia one by one. There—I gestured—was Rosso, emeritus now, and there beside him on an iron bench, Lionel, Prince, and Treech; there was Jervis, the social historian, waving his hands a little fearsomely at a pair of musicologists; there was a knot of medievalists beneath a hungry-looking tree; there was Little, the dialectician, standing thoughtfully alone.

  “Where’re the wives?” Julia asked me. “At ours we have wives.”

  “I don’t think there are very many,” I said. “These guys are like nuns. They’re married to it.”

  Tip Chandler, too, had been a lifelong bachelor, a fact of which certain elements of the faculty had recently made much.

  “Like nuns,” Julia said. “I suppose it’s a living.”

  McTaggett was bustling over a hastily erected hibachi. When he caught my gaze he released the meat to someone else’s charge and hurried over to where Julia and I stood in the building’s shade.

  “It’s always the same,” he said, grandly morose, “burnt on the outside, raw on the inside.” He wiped his forehead with one big hand, then offered that hand to Julia. “I’m Greg McTaggett.”

  She shook his hand a little longer than was necessary, giving me a look: See what I go through. “So can I ask you a question?” she said.

  “I’ll do my best.”

  “Why are there so many professors in a department without any students?”

  One of the professors nearby was saying, “Yes, yes”—as if this question had been bothering him too, but until now he had been unable to put it precisely into words.

  “Good question,” McTaggett said. “We have a grant from the Henderson Society to keep the positions filled. Mr. Kosugi takes a personal interest in our department, fortunately for us.”

  “The radio man,” Julia said.

  “Well,” I announced, “a hamburger for me is great. Anybody want anything?”

  My interruption, though calculated, was not insincere. The Grape Arbor’s legacy to me: I find an ordinary hamburger difficult to resist.

  “Nothing,” Julia said.

  “Be careful,” McTaggett said. “They’re raw on the inside.”

  The man McTaggett had left tending the grill stuck out a hand at my approach.

  “Sam Grapearbor?” He was a thin, grayish man of an indeterminate middle age. The wide set of his eyes and the tilt of his brows made him seem on the verge of panic.

  “I am that man,” I said, shaking his hand; it was unpleasantly warm from the heat of the grill.

  “Frank Slotkin,” he told me. “I’m the one whose job you’re taking.” His voice was papery, reminiscent of seclusion.

  We exchanged pleasantries about our work: me about my nursery rhymes, he about the revolutionary bread-factory poet, the subject of his dissertation. Then a silence fell.

  “The job’s not bad,” Slotkin said finally. “It’s dull. But if you don’t mind dull it’s not bad.”

  “I wouldn’t think so.”

  “Ellen—his wife—she can be a little off-putting. But in the end it’s not a real problem.”

  “That’s good to hear.”

  He nodded; I nodded. Off-putting? The smell of burned meat hung thickly between us.

  “You can get a lot of work done,” Slotkin said. He nodded again. I had the feeling he was trying to warn me of something I couldn’t quite make out; maybe something he couldn’t quite make out.

  “After a while it’s like being alone,” he said. The wind picked up and seemed to blow something out of his face. “Hamburger?” He chiseled one off the grill.

  “Actually, maybe later,” I said. I turned back toward Julia and McTaggett. Slotkin followed my gaze. Julia waved to me with half her hand. The wind was buffeting her dress back into a triangle, extending behind and away from her like low wings.

  “Your girlfriend?” Slotkin asked.

  “Yes,” I said, strangely giddy; as if I were getting away with some three-quarters-truth. I started to go.

  “Oh,” he said.

  I turned around.

  “He likes checkers.”

  Checkers, I thought, as I walked back, hamburgerless. Everybody likes checkers. I like checkers. How could he have said it would be dull?

  “I see you met Slotkin,” McTaggett said. “Did he give you some useful advice?”

  “He said Higgs’s wife was off-putting.”

  “Did he?”

  McTaggett clasped his hands behind him, considered.

  “I’m not sure I’d be willing to go that far myself.”

  “It must be hard on her,” Julia said.

  He started, as if he’d forgotten she was there.

  “Well, yes,” he said. “I imagine it must.”

  I still didn’t know what “off-putting” meant. But I found I was unable to keep my mind on it for long; something about the steady wash of sun, the smell of the drying ground, the drizzle of smoke that jaunted crookedly up from the grill, forbade all thoughts but the simplest. It’s warm, I thought. McTaggett’s here. Julia’s here. I turned my face up to the sun and shut my eyes, staring out into the red of my lids as endless as a new sky. I smell grass, I thought. I’m hungry.

  “Wasn’t so bad, right?” I asked Julia, as we walked home, down Anaxagoras. On the corner ahead of
us an old man with steel-wool hair was selling hurt books off a table.

  “I liked Professor McTaggett.”

  “He’s likable.”

  After a while I said, “So you’re glad you went?”

  “As the saying goes, I’m not sure I’d be willing to go that far myself.”

  “Fair enough—glad’s a strong word.”

  “Glad,” Julia said, “is a strong plastic bag.”

  It was only when Julia felt weary that she came out with nonsensical, unanswerable jokes like that. Since we’d settled on staying in Chandler City she felt weary more often than before; though staying had been her idea all along. Next her mood would turn cold and she would make a remark. I could see it warring in her face with her natural disposition toward kindness and pluck. Her skin absorbed the late light, reddening to match her freckles and the bricks of the warehouses.

  “Those guys are weird,” she said, without inflection. “Are you going to get like that too?”

  At these moments I felt—well, stomach-churning fear, yes, the kind I was used to at any danger or rebuke, but, too, a cheery, vigorous, obligatory lightness. I’d grab her under the shoulders and haul her out of despond; if it took a low distracting joke, if it took a pratfall, if it took a spray of apologies. Even if I had to resort to sentimental compliments, I’d buoy her up.

  “What—weird? Obviously not, not me.”

  “They remind me of your college friends.”

  “Oh, no,” I said. “They could be the way they are now, and also eat baby harp seals, while listening to Depeche Mode, and they would not be as bad as my college friends.”

  But I knew what she meant. The professors had something in common, something I couldn’t place. Not the same as my college friends, whose afflictions were simple, nasty things. With the professors it was something subtler: there was a shared insubstantiality, a harried look, a way of talking as if the words they were saying had been selected and conjoined years back, and were just now finding their exhausted way out. Sometimes their feet seemed insecurely attached to the earth. I could have told Julia all this. But I didn’t think I could make sense of it. And I felt it would be better, now and in the future, if she thought it were all in her mind.

  Julia’s face lightened a little and I saw she’d accepted, for now, my offer of repair.

  “You’re right,” she said. “They could all have Hitler mustaches and they wouldn’t be as bad as your college friends.”

  “Maybe as bad as Wickman; Wickman wasn’t so bad.” And as I mentioned his name I was visited, against, you must believe, my will, by a vision of Wickman, engaged with Julia’s Mohawked friend in the very sex act he’d invited himself to perform upon her, these many months past. With pleasure I shared this grim and hilarious picture with Julia. We forgot the professors, her weariness, and my forced charm, and cheered by this impossible reminiscence we progressed home in a spirit of tenderness and sport.

  Shortly afterwards, I graduated. Julia and I spent commencement day in bed, playing Sink, a game of our own invention. One of us would propose a place—Greenland, say—which the world, in our opinion, would do as well without. Then we would focus our psychokinetic powers and by the combined force of our thought send the chosen place to its watery rest.

  “Trinidad,” I suggested; Julia made no objection; down it went. Julia countered with Kentucky. Just like that, a new Great Lake. “Sink Los Angeles,” I said.

  “We already sunk Los Angeles.”

  “Sink it deeper, then. Make it a trench.”

  We pressed our fingers to our temples, ground our jaws; it was so.

  Our diplomas came in the mail two days later. “Isn’t it exciting?” Julia said, hugging me. “We’re adults now.”

  And it was exciting. My four years of imprisonment were over; I no longer had any institutional ties to Chandler City. I still had no money, but I was certified as educated, and was somewhat wordly-wiser. I could leave any time I wished.

  But—here’s the exciting part now—I didn’t want to go. Without my noticing it the prospect of staying put had become not so terrible. In our low, oily L Julia and I had constructed our own miniature city-state. The striped, porridgy mattress at the room’s elbow served as our seat of government; our respective desks became a pair of companionably feuding baronies; and the lone window on the east-facing wall was a view through a mountain pass to the vast disorderly world of life-sized countries. Who needed that world? Not me, not us. Aside from the sandwich-selling Greek at the corner we were entirely self-sufficient.

  I visited Higgs’s house for the first time three weeks later, on a Saturday, the fifteenth of June.

  “Ides,” I told McTaggett. He had thought it best to come along and introduce me.

  “No,” he said, “you missed them. The ides of June are the thirteenth.”

  “I guess that’s a good omen.”

  “If you insist,” McTaggett said.

  A flagstone path ran down to the house. The lawn on either side looked like a haircut abandoned halfway through.

  “Ready?” McTaggett said.

  He rang the bell; through the heavy mahogany door the sound was soft and queerly unresonant. There was music in the house, but I couldn’t make out what.

  When Ellen Higgs opened the door the music swept out and smacked us like a palm. I took an involuntary step backward, almost tripping, and pressed my hands against my ears. It was a Latin song playing—marimbas loud as wrecking balls, trumpets like eighteen-wheelers skidding to a stop. McTaggett remained on the doorstep, apparently unaffected.

  Experimentally I angled my hands a bit outward, so that my ears were slightly uncovered. The music was loud, but not so painfully loud as before. The initial surprise had been the worst. Bracing myself, I dropped my hands and stepped up to meet Mrs. Higgs.

  She was not what I had expected; that is to say, not a harridan, a cleaver-wielding harpy, Clytemnestra in a housedress. Instead I saw a mild-looking woman of about fifty, in a checked blouse, her eyes a pale surprised blue. She seemed to have been unexpectedly called away from something—but I learned after a while that she always looked like that.

  “Mrs. Higgs,” McTaggett shouted, “I want you to meet Samuel Grapearbor.”

  “He’s the new one?” Her voice cut through the racket like a bell—like a disapproving bell, a schoolbell. Now that my ears were adjusting I was beginning to discern other sounds beneath the din of the radio: a clattering fan, a Spanish newscast, a straining, grinding whine that I thought might be a malfunctioning blender. McTaggett put his hand on my shoulder and guided me through the door, into the dim and empty foyer.

  “Is Professor Higgs downstairs?” McTaggett asked.

  “Where else?”

  McTaggett turned to me. “Then down we go.”

  So the two of us started down the stairs; and when we reached the bottom I forgot the noise, forgot my nervousness. Neither Slotkin nor McTaggett had bothered to prepare me for my first sight of Higgs’s astounding basement.

  I have already mentioned that the house had once belonged to the university’s anthropology department. The move had been hurried, and the anthropologists had used the excuse of haste to leave behind everything they didn’t want: specimens which were duplicates, or demonstrably forged, or simply poor examples of their kind. In all the years the Higgses had lived there, they (I mean Ellen) had never seen fit to get rid of it all.

  The basement was a little, stuffy room, packed halfway up the wall with the anthropologists’ unsorted leftovers: flint blades and arrowheads, fat daikoku, fertility dolls, chipped pots and fragments of pots, Kachinas of various provenances, tiny woven mats, handleless vases, noseless statues, chisels, pestles, adzes, scattered across the concrete floor, heaped in the corners, without regard for function or origin. A few exasperated-looking masks hung from sills beneath a row of half-height windows. In places the floor was three deep in tattered prayer rugs. It was as if the world’s forgotten cultures had pooled their meager reso
urces and mounted a garage sale.

  Across from the stairs there was a richly filigreed sarcophagus, wide open, and inside it a wrapped, mummified corpse. (“Twentieth-century forgery,” McTaggett explained to me later. “A couple of Belgians dug up an Arab and pickled him. A real one wouldn’t last a month in this climate.”) Next to the Arab was the only evidence of modern times: the bank of tape recorders which were to capture Higgs’s remarks, when and if they came.

  For the second time in five minutes, I stumbled backwards in dismay.

  “I should have told you,” McTaggett whispered, shaking his head. “Stupid of me not to have thought.”

  I mention Higgs himself last because, to be honest, he was the last thing I noticed. He was sitting in the far corner of the room at a round card table, facing us, apparently unperturbed by my novel presence. He looked much as he had in the newspaper photographs from thirteen years before; older, of course, but the architecture of his face was the same, his haircut, even the musty-looking shirt he wore.

  (But there was one difference, one I didn’t know about. Higgs’s gaze, by the time I met him, no longer flickered from person to person, near to far; instead it was steady, fixed on an unexceptional point in space, a few feet in front of his sheepdog eyes.)

  “Professor Higgs,” McTaggett said, “this is Samuel Grapearbor. He’ll be sitting with you from now on.” McTaggett inclined his head toward the chair opposite Higgs; dutifully, I sat.

  “I’m going,” he said. “Well. Good luck.” He clomped upstairs. Faintly, under the music, I heard the front door open and shut.

  So this is it, I thought. Postgraduate education.

  I slid my chair over to what I estimated to be the focal point of Higgs’s gaze. “Hello, Professor Higgs,” I said, experimentally. “I’m a great admirer of your work.”

  His fixed stare and the unrelenting calm of his expression made me nervous, the way a defective child makes one nervous, but worse in this case because I knew he was not defective; I had to keep reminding myself that Higgs was no doubt executing a mental description of me, even as I was of him. And what must he have thought of me? Probably not much. To him I was just another entry in the long undifferentiated series of young men who had shared his cluttered basement, waiting for him to speak.