The Grasshopper King Page 8

  Of course, I was special; I was the last one. But even Higgs could not have known that yet.

  My duties were simple. I was required to stay with Higgs from nine in the morning until eight o’clock at night, when Ellen would take him up to bed. The tape recorders were staggered, so that reels ran out at every even-numbered hour. When a tape ended, I was to remove it from the recorder, label it with date and time, and replace it with a fresh one from the cabinet behind the mummy. Were Higgs actually to speak, I was supposed to move into my position across from him at the table and record, in a stenographer’s notebook provided me for this purpose, whatever gestures and expressive actions accompanied his words. Barring that, all I had to do was wait. It was dull, all right. I wished now that I had brought some work to do.

  At half-past eleven Ellen came downstairs dragging an electric vacuum cleaner behind her like a reluctant dance partner. The machine set to a furious screw-loose clattering the moment she turned it on. She took care to cover every part of the floor, some more than once; often the fringe of a rug or the end of a flax rope would catch in the nozzle and the noise would excite itself to an even higher, more discomfiting pitch. When she was finished, not having spoken a word, she disappeared upstairs. An hour later, she came back down and started over.

  “This place must collect a lot of dust,” I said, as congenially as I could.

  Ellen ignored me. She kicked aside a pile of eccentric grindstones and vacuumed the immaculate floor underneath. I was struck suddenly by the absurd fear that she had recognized my voice from my drunken phone call, three years before; that she was waiting for me to apologize, or worse, that she had no interest in my apologies. I pushed it aside.

  “Saturday’s a good day for housecleaning,” I offered.

  She lifted up a stack of thatch something-covers and a dozen or so insects leaped out, bouncing into far corners and disappearing before I’d gotten a good look.

  “You’ve got crickets?” I asked.

  “Grasshoppers,” she said. “They’ve been down here since we moved in. We tried poisoning them.” Then her face closed up. She seemed angry that I had gotten her to speak.

  Later in the day I went upstairs to look around, on the pretext of needing to use the bathroom. I was desperate for something to do. I had picked up, looked over, and set down every slingshot and bridle in the place—some twice. I had made my egg salad sandwich last an hour and a half.

  The above-ground portion of the house, now that I had seen the basement, was stirringly ordinary; although in isolation it might have been a bit unnerving. The light filtering through the poured-glass window was gray and cool, more like March than June, and the house had a shut-in, bookish smell, although there were no books anywhere. In fact, there was not much of anything anywhere. By means of some slow gravity the upstairs was as empty as the basement was full. There were no tables in sight, no coatrack; no chairs, no shelves, not even any lamps. The only furniture I could see was Ellen’s stereo, which squatted at the center of a Stonehenge of speakers, its equalizer lights fluctuating now to the beat of an auto commercial. I’d been in the house eight hours and already it didn’t seem so loud.

  I nearly collided with Ellen in the foyer.

  “Yes?” she said—hostile, frank.

  “The bathroom . . .”

  She jerked her head leftward at a door I hadn’t noticed.

  The bathroom, unsurprisingly, was bare; but tucked under the lower rim of the mirror there was some minor ornament, miraculously left in place. Looking closer, I saw it was a remote microphone. McTaggett had explained this to me. There was a pick-up in every room but the bedroom, wired to the banks of recorders downstairs. Wherever Higgs decided to hold forth, the apparatus would be ready.

  Even the water was loud. When the toilet flushed it sounded like a jetliner launching through hail.

  Back downstairs, no vehicles for amusement having sprung up in my absence, I suddenly remembered Slotkin’s last piece of advice.

  “You want to play checkers, Professor Higgs?”

  Not even a flicker in return. But I was too bored to be deterred. I found the checkerboard propped up by the sarcophagus.

  “We’re going to play some checkers now, okay?” It comforted me to keep talking. “Here we go . . . I’m setting up the board now. I’m going first.”

  During my preparations Higgs’s gaze had not once deviated from its position; but as soon as I had made my opening move, his eyes snapped down to the board. He moved his man. Within five minutes he had beaten me handily. We played six more games and I lost every one.

  “You’re very good, Professor Higgs,” I said, and although his expression did not, of course, change, I postulated a slow inner smile, imagined him luxuriating in the idea of a new opponent, someone else to teach, slowly and by example, working upward through the levels of strategy, postponing as long as possible the despairing moment when both players’ knowledge of the game was exactly equal. With Slotkin that moment must have been years past.

  When I came home that night there was a lasagna on the bed. It was piled into a stewpot, a little lopsided, and under its weight our sad mattress sagged almost to the floor.

  “Hi, breadwinner,” Julia said. “What do you think?”

  “It looks great,” I said, a little guiltily; guiltily because my first reaction, when the startling smell of a cooked and actual meal had met me at the door, had been to think, I’m in the wrong place.

  “I got the recipe from our secretary. And the pot is from the kitchenette in my old dorm.”

  We sat down on either side of the bed and dug ambitiously in. “How was the first day?” Julia asked me. Beneath the first layer of noodles the cheese was waxy and cold. Strangely, this touched off in me a little hubbub of affection.

  “I couldn’t wait to get home,” I said.

  Meanwhile, I was learning more about Henderson. By the time I came to the subject, his life story had been scavenged and glued into something that almost made sense. It turned out Henderson was the terminus of a somewhat noble English line, which had been reduced by the end of the nineteenth century to landlessness and progressive politics. In 1895, his parents, reckoning correctly that no proletarian revolution was imminent in Britain, picked up their meager stakes and moved east. They settled in the Gravine as party organizers, and, when the revolution finally came, were rewarded for their efforts by being purged. Henderson left for Berlin a month later. He stayed there until 1940, when, having somehow run afoul of the Nazis, he fled to London.

  In the intervening years he wrote, and he published; mostly, that is, he copied out his verses in his own painstaking hand, and passed them out at streetcorners, or in parks, or in front of churches and banks. On one occasion he released a hundred copies of “Vile Mouse Conspiracy” from the roof of an apartment house in Potsdam. (That was what had gotten him the littering citation.) His poems, which he carefully marked with the date of composition and his initial “H,” formed a more or less complete record of his time in Berlin. The only break of any size was a six-month interval in 1932, which time, Henderson intimated later, he had spent in Holland. He never said why.

  McTaggett had me working on a short story of Henderson’s that had appeared, with the author’s own impenetrable translation alongside, in a 1922 number of an agrarian-feudalist monthly called Tractor. Each day I brought the story with me to Higgs’s house, where I sat in the chair across from him, translating, my copy of Kaufmann on the table between us, trying to ignore the racket from upstairs. I had hoped that the sight of Henderson’s text in the original Gravinic might catch Higgs’s attention—in vain. Only the checkerboard could stir him. We played fifteen or twenty games each afternoon. I had gotten into the habit of making a running commentary as we played, partly to hear the sound of a voice, and partly to convey the idea that my attitude toward the game was one of detached amusement, that it was nothing more than a mildly entertaining respite from my work, one about which I maintained a healthy sense
of humor, and that it certainly did not matter to me when I lost—which was every single time.

  “A costly miscue by Grapearbor,” I’d say, as Higgs laid me open with a triple jump. “The champion wastes no time taking advantage of the upstart challenger’s childish blunder.” Then, a little later: “Grapearbor’s defense is in disarray. Ladies and gentlemen, the desperation is palpable. It appears Grapearbor has no chance . . . and Higgs jumps Grapearbor’s final man. This one is history. Higgs is the winner.”

  When Higgs played checkers, he made a small continuous sound, deep in his throat, a bit like a growl but with no connotation of menace. It was as if the checker-playing segment of him had grown noisy with age and overuse, like Ellen’s vacuum cleaner. I noticed the sound only after a few days; it took me that long to pick it out under the general din from upstairs. Ellen would change the channel on the radio now and then, to keep me distracted, I supposed, and some days would leave the tuner between stations, besieging me with static and the distant, panicky voices of churchmen. Even so, I learned in time to hear the smaller noises: Higgs’s sound, and the collective murmur of the grasshoppers, which was loudest in the morning and faded as the day wore on. Each day Ellen came down four or five times with the vacuum; each time I tried vainly to engage her in conversation. I was no longer trying to be friendly. Now it was one hundred percent spite.

  “Take it easy on her,” Julia advised me, “you can’t blame her for not wanting you there. You wouldn’t want you there, if you were her.”

  This counterfactual gave us both pause.

  “But I am there,” I said. “It’s just my job to be there. It’s not my fault Higgs doesn’t talk.”

  “Maybe it’s her husband she’s really angry at.”

  That made sense, in the abstract. But I’d been there, and I knew—it was me. Though angry wasn’t quite the word; people had been angry at me, for good reasons, my whole life, and I knew what that felt like. Ellen wasn’t angry; she endured me, as if I, McTaggett, the tape recorders, the scholars, were just another alien presence sharing space in her house, like the grasshoppers. Not even worth poisoning.

  Three weeks into my tenure, Professor Treech came to the house for the first time. He announced himself with a quick double knock: RAT-tat. Ellen was in the basement with me, vacuuming. When she heard Treech’s knock her face folded for a moment into something quite terrible. She looked as if she had something unpleasant in her mouth but were someplace where it would be inappropriate to spit. She leaned the still-running vacuum against the wall and went upstairs to let him in. I followed, with no little interest. It was the first time since I’d been there that anyone had come.

  Treech was the department’s liaison to the Henderson Society. The Society had imposed on him the duty of visiting the house each month, looking over Higgs and his surroundings, and quizzing us as to the likelihood, in our opinions, of a break in the case. Ellen responded to his greeting with a silence even frostier than the one she used on me. I would not have thought it possible. With a little sniff she vanished into the kitchen.

  “So you’re the new man,” Treech said to me, giving me an up-and-down look. He was nervous, thin, knife-nosed, a bit pocked. His hair fell in slack wings on either side of his head, giving him, as a whole, the shape of an arrow. He had a reputation as a facile and unoriginal thinker.

  “That’s right,” I said.

  Treech had nothing more to say on that subject. He clapped his hands for punctuation. “Then let’s stop down and see the good Professor, shall we?” His voice took on a desperate upward lilt which might have been his attempt at jollity. I wasn’t sure Treech was talking to me. But I followed him downstairs.

  He checked the tape recorders first, making sure each set of heads was spinning freely. Then he asked me a few obviously memorized questions: any unusual behavior on Higgs’s part, any action I could read as mute complaint, mute enlightenment, mute despair . . . No, I told him, no, no, and so on, feeling, despite myself, a little chirp of competence—this was my job, I was doing it.

  Finally he came to Higgs. Treech felt his forehead, tugged at his lower eyelids, pulled up his shirt and listened to his breathing with a cheap-looking stethoscope. Higgs accepted all this impassively.

  “Healthy as a horse,” Treech pronounced. “Will you listen to that clapper.” Here, suddenly overtaken with fellow-feeling, he walloped my shoulder with his cupped hand. “Clean living!”

  “You’d have to think so,” I said.

  “We should all treat ourselves so well,” Treech said. He deployed a sort of leer in my direction. “But, you know . . .”

  I was still trying to construct some suitable reply when Treech changed the subject again. “We’re going to take pictures,” he said, pulling a camera from his satchel. “Mrs. Higgs!”

  Ellen descended warily. “What is it?”

  “Is it going to be all right if we just take some photos here? It’s for the newsletter.”

  “It is not,” she said. But Treech had already started shooting. He took one picture of the three of us, another of Ellen and Higgs, and one last shot—as Ellen reached out angrily for the camera—of her alone.

  “Get out,” Ellen said.

  “Right away, Mrs. Higgs. See you next month.”

  After Treech left, Ellen vacuumed the basement for two hours straight, as if he’d left some trail that only her detective eyes could see, that only her rattling vacuum could erase. To my surprise I felt almost sorry for her.

  I tried catching her eye. “Hey, what a jerk, huh?”

  She straightened up.

  “What Professor Treech is,” she said, “is not important. I’d like it much better if you wouldn’t speak to me, now that you know your way around the house.”

  Then she bent to her vacuum cleaner again, leaning her whole weight on it as if it were a broom. She moved behind Higgs to clean the corner; she tapped the back of his chair gently and he scooted up to give her room. No; it wasn’t Higgs she was mad at. The two of them were still in league.

  “The last one didn’t talk at all,” she said.

  “All right,” I said, with a hardness that unnerved me. “All right. I tried.”

  I was no tenderfoot; in my social career I had annoyed, and been annoyed in turn, by hundreds of people of all temperaments and stations. When my irritation with one acquaintance grew too keen to be borne, I’d move on to annoy someone else. After a week or so, I’d feel a twinge of forgiveness toward my first partner; then I knew it was time to reestablish contact, make up, and experience the slow and enjoyable build-up to antipathy once again.

  With Ellen it was different; there was no decay. The moment she opened the door in the morning I was just as inflamed as I’d been the night before. Was she doing this to me on purpose? I couldn’t tell. Somehow, that made it worse.

  Julia suggested deep breathing. Ha! I could have chuffed like a racehorse with an “Om” on each exhale; it wouldn’t have made a dent. I couldn’t walk past Ellen without wanting to punch her; but I didn’t punch her. It wasn’t that I wouldn’t punch an old woman. It was that I was afraid I might lose. She seemed like a woman who might know karate, or something more secret than karate; or who could just take my forehead in her palm and force me whimpering to the ground.

  Anyway, I had another way of getting back at her, a slicker, more satisfying way. McTaggett had told me, in rough, the story of Higgs’s retreat into silence, the Society’s installation of the listening devices, and Ellen’s futile resistance. So I knew that the absence of a microphone upstairs was a special favor granted Ellen by her father—and that seemed hardly fair. What if Higgs did talk in his sleep? What if Ellen’s selfish desire for privacy was, all by itself, holding up the progress of human knowledge? It was only right, I assured myself, that I should take whatever steps I could to undo Dean Moresby’s nepotistic leniency. If I succeeded in getting the bedroom wired up it would make Ellen furious; and at the same time it would advance the cause of learning.
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  Of course, I had no say in the matter. I was just a student, and a new one. I possessed no influence; I held no sway. But Treech did.

  I arranged to meet him one evening at his office. The walls were covered with unimpressive-looking prizes and citations, neatly framed. On his desk there was a photo of his dog.

  “My good man,” he said, skinny palms pressed together. “I’m glad we’re having this meeting.” It did not seem quite right to shake his hand—unsure whether I was meant to come forward, I halted just inside the doorway and stood clumsily on the spot until Treech motioned me to sit in the rattan chair across the desk from him.

  “You’re a Henderson man,” Treech said.

  “I’m working on one of his stories.”

  “That’s good,” he said. “It should always be a Henderson man. So he’ll feel among his own. Slotkin wasn’t one.”

  “But there wasn’t really any choice.”

  “No,” Treech said, then was quiet for a very long time, as if the possibility of there being no choice had just occurred to him for the first time, and he were faced with the abrupt and unpleasant necessity of counting out those instances of choicelessness which he might have still to endure. “There was no choice.”

  “There’s something I have to talk to you about,” I said. At this Treech retreated from his reverie and grew businesslike. “It’s about Higgs.”

  Treech nodded. “Naturally.”

  I was trying to remember everything I’d read in spy novels about how to lie. I had read spy novels mostly for the sex scenes and my memory of the actual spying was sketchy at best.

  “I’ve been having concerns,” I said.

  “And bringing them to me is the right thing to do.”

  “About the bedroom.”

  “Ah—the bedroom.”

  “I think”—I steadied myself—“he’s talking up there.”