“Then you must bear absolute responsibility for what you have become.”
“All right,” Scop said. “If you say so. I can’t argue this any more. It’s really ridiculous, you know,” he added conversationally and made effort to disperse the image, willing himself toward awakeness in the fashion that a diver might crouch over himself, begin the manipulations for surfacing. “I’m only doing this to help everyone,” he continued and waited patiently for the vault from the dream to begin, for the image of the Master to become translucent but it did not, much to his dismay the Master remained as concrete and implacable as he had before. The walls of the room in which they were conferring did not diminish in their solidity. “It isn’t so easy you see,” the Master said, “you can’t simply get away with ending these discussions whenever you’d like; you have to stay and deal with them and there are certain things which have to be said to you.”
Scop cannot bring himself to pay attention to the Master. Nor, it seems, can he cause the scene to disperse; he seems to be caught instead in a perilous middle ground where midway between the dream and the actual form which he would take, the Master seems bound now to the necessity to lecture. “You can change nothing,” the Master said, “absolutely nothing within and without. Your quest is hopeless. It is not change you are creating but merely slaughter.”
“Two by two is four,” Scop said, remembering an old assurance from somewhere that the fabric of a dream could be broken down by the fixation upon, the reiteration of irrelevant material. “And eight times three is twenty-four. In 1963 at the age of forty-six John Fitzgerald Kennedy—”
“These mnemonic devices will get you nowhere, Scop. You cannot evade the truth any longer. The constantly reiterated rape which seems to be at the very center time and again of your obsessions—” “The first President of the United States was George Washington. The thirty-ninth was—”
“Should give you the deepest insight into yourself. What do you really think you want?”
“Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. A prime number is a number divisible only by one or itself. The number of sexes is two, the number of chromosomes forty-eight except in the case of—”
“Oh enough, enough!” the Master shouts with disgust and makes a dismissive gesture. “Have it your way. I’m not going to stay here anymore and try to argue with you; if you won’t see the sense of it it’s not going to be from me, you’ll just have to undertake all the suffering yourself. But don’t blame me,” he says and brings fire down with his hand blowing Scop quite free of the fabric of the dream and into a tight enclosure where he lies rocking above—
CHAPTER X
HISTORY AS REDEMPTION:—Not Elaine Kozciouskos with whom he would be quite prepared to copulate even in his rather disturbed state, sleep-drenched, sleep shattered but instead some woman he has never seen before who bears a thin resemblance and then again it may only be misapprehension to a major figure of the time through which he is endlessly looping. “Slow,” she says to him with an obscene flourish of gesture, “slow and easy and all will be fine,” winding and tightening her little thighs against his entrapped organ, blinking and winking as she brings up her hands then to gather him in. “If you take it slow it will be fine but if you rush it you’ll lose it. Big boy,” she says as he topples over her then, “fuck me you big, obsessed son of a bitch, you time-traveller you, you crazy little reorganizer of historical cycles,” and he begins to moan and gasp within her reflexively, he has never known a woman to talk to him in this fashion although of course he has hoped for it many times. Scop lives in a rather repressed age. “Come on, do it, get it all the way in,” she mutters and he wonders whether this too is a dream; circumstance would fit this possibility neatly, it would be in fact exactly the kind of cruelty which the Masters would invoke . . . but no, it cannot be a dream, the richness of her flesh, the solidity of the contact, the little grunts which pour from her as he digs in and out are not the components of mystery but have the snaffling awkwardness of the sexual act itself at least as he has always understood it. He doubts very much then that this is a dream although you can never be entirely sure.
“I said don’t stop, you big bugger you,” the woman mutters, yanking him back to a poised if rather surreal attention and Scop does not know why the matter of his copulation is so important to her, surely she cannot be aroused, it falls almost entirely away from his experience that a woman might urgently need sex but he is nothing if not willing, in a dreamlike state or not he has always shown himself able to meet circumstances on their own terms and so he begins to pummel and paw at her flesh in this state, little obligatory moans pouring from him, small confidences of need as he digs and whines, pokes and kneads, eventually he begins to sense orgasm building within him although it is mostly known as pain rather than desire; sex has never been for him, perhaps as profoundly satisfying as it is rumored to be for some others.
But then again this is not a sexual era. Sex, Scop thinks behind blinded eyes, heaving and bucking automatically, sex went out of the culture sometime around 1970, in the last seventy years the sources of satisfaction have been more inclined toward death. Death and manipulation. There was a time and as a scholar of the period he knows of it when much of the culture was pinned upon sex: all of the anxieties and obsessions of individuals were bound up with it, even the profound political and social interlock of the culture could be unravelled and traced back to that simple and pitiful connection . . . but it is gone, gone: he lives in a bleak murderous age, an age of Masters and temporal shocks, an age of halls and machineries and conferences, an age in which only the possibility of travel through time itself to rearrange the artifacts of the society gives hope for some difference . . . and thinking in this rather muddy fashion Scop continues to work upon the woman yielding at last a thin trickle of discharge so bitter, so poisonously wrenched from him that it might not have been love but death which she had yanked. An old obsession of course. He has known it before. The equation of sex with death is too modest and banal to demand much consideration. In his characteristic way Scop rolls from her then, inverts on the bed, looks at the ceiling. Always after intercourse he finds it necessary to look above him as if sex were a return to the bestial, as if the inversion were to express his yearning once again to be free. Mysterious but satisfying. He hears the sound of her breathing beside him.
“Don’t talk,” he says, anticipating conversation, “there’s no need to talk.”
“I wasn’t going to.”
“If you talk I’m going to have to leave instantly,” Scop says, “on the other hand if you’ll be quiet I’ll lie here for a while. It’s your decision.”
“On the contrary, it’s your decision. You control matters, you know.”
“Do I?”
“Of course,” she says, “you are the subject, I am merely the object. How can you be so stupid? How can you believe otherwise?”
He turns, looks at her. This cannot be a dream, he thinks, or at least it is not necessarily a dream because no dream-image would express itself so forcefully, with such individuality and in a disturbing way she has come closer to him than even the Masters. The Masters have never suggested that Scop might control his world. Looking at her, the soft mask of her face falling across the harder, more penetrating lines so that he can see her too as an artifact he thinks that he is on the verge of recognition, that he knows who she is and that that revelation will in some way change his life but this slides from him as so much else has and he turns away. He is not on an identity-quest and she is by no means the central facet of his existence. Knowing who she is would really prove nothing. “Well,” he says after a time, “it’s been great but I guess I’d better leave now.” He does not know what this really means. Among other things, where is he supposed to go? Where is he now for that matter? But he will find out, all will come clear to him as he moves toward the passageways. One must remain essentially hopeful; one must counsel a reasonable optimism in his life. “It’s been very nice,” he says, “and I don’t want you to think that I wouldn’tlike to stay but—”
“But you’re busy. Well of course. That’s perfectly all right, it’s always understandable. Get on your way you busy man you. Go ahead and change the course of history.”
This for some reason makes him bridle; he looks at her in a way he has not before, noting the cunning and artifice with which her body, her manner, her very mood has been put together; there is more art to this woman than, perhaps, in anything he has yet accomplished. Regarding her out of sexual context he is able to appreciate her in a way which was not possible before: dispassionate, beyond challenge. “Are you making fun of me?” he says seriously.
“Of course not. Of course you’re going to change the course of history. Isn’t that what you’re here for?”
“I don’t know. What does it matter to you?”
She puts her clasped hands above her head, her breasts slightly expanded although it maybe only Scop’s eyes that have opened in response to the display. Hard to tell. Everything is hard to tell but on the other hand if circumstantial judgements are not to be made, what then? Life is a series of choices. “It matters a great deal to me,” she says. “After all you seek to change all of our lives which would include mine as well since I am a contemporary of yours, inhabiting the same world which you inhabit, lurking in similar corridors, incurring similar doubts.”
Is she mocking him? This is possible. Scop begins to seek his clothing. After he gets dressed he will then have to find a way out to be sure but he will handle one thing at a time. “I’m trying to change the world,” he says seriously, “there’s no reason to laugh at me.”
“I’m not laughing at you. Where did you get the idea that I was doing that?”
“From your facial expression. From your tone of voice. From what you are saying.”
“Well,” she says, drawing her elbow across her chest, concealing her little breasts, a solemn and distressed expression cleaving its way down the little ridges of her face, “I don’t think that I like that. I don’t think there’s any reason for you to saythat . Ofcourse I take you seriously and depend upon you. Doesn’t everyone? We can’t go on living this way indefinitely in a society framed by murder. Your courageous efforts to alter the social fix are very highly admired I must say, by all of those except the very few whose vested interest in the power and position given them by this society is menaced. But they hardly matter at all. Actually you’re a hero for more than you would think. Why else do you imagine that I’d come to your quarters, considering the penalties?”
That solves one mystery at least, Scop thinks. Now he knows where he is. He is in his quarters and she has come to him clandestinely bearing the gifts and danger of herself to render comfort. He is glad to have heard that. It thrusts more context upon their relationship than he ever thought they would truly find. Of course it leaves him with other unsolved problems. He draws his robes tightly around him, grateful for this imagined cloak they give him. “I’m just doing the best I can,” he says modestly, “it’s a very difficult effort.”
“Well of course it is. We all know that. We know how slight the chances are of success. That’s why we’re so particularly admiring.”
“You don’t have to be snide.”
“I’m not being snide. I’m still lying here naked for one thing. It would have been very easy for me to have gotten dressed and left here just as soon as you did. The trouble with you is that you’re too suspicious. You’re suspicious of everyone’s motives; you can’t imagine that someone would really have your interests at heart, just as I do. Look at the risks I’m taking. Why you little revolutionary of the modern consciousness,” she say and stretches out her arms, her nipples seem to flare and bounce upon her chest although this too he thinks must be an illusion compounded of fright, “you can come right back here and we’ll have sex again. The fact is that you’re absolutely lousy in bed and I’mstill willing to have sex, if only for your sake. What do you think ofthat now?”
Scop shrugs. He feels little dimples appearing, the suspicion of a blush in the corners of his blunt and square features, vaulting upwards. “Well,” he says, “well now,that’s ridiculous.” He is not in the least insulted by the suggestion that his sexual performance has been inept. If anything he feels empowered by it. “No,” he says, “after all, there are more important things to do. I must be on my way now; I must not abandon—”
“That’s why you’re so adorable, you little megalomaniac you. You’re absolutely dedicated to a completely individual vision of the world.” She moves her fingers, trembles on the bed. “That’s why you can come back here anytime.”
“Oh well,” he says, “oh well, it’s neither here nor there. I mean it doesn’t matter.”
She sits in a single graceful motion that seems to carry her breasts below waist-length. This must be an illusion too; he had not imagined her to be so large-breasted at all. Live and learn. “Of course it matters,” she says, “you big time-traveler you, you reconstructor of the universe. It matters a great deal, why single-handedly you’re trying to restore us to a world of decency and hope, that’s what you’re trying to do. Now that’s a remarkable thing. You’re certainly entitled to all the help that you can get. You can come back,” she says meaningfully and thrusts a single breast at him, a large, pointed contraption with a marvelous, conical nipple which he had never noticed until this moment, “you can come back anytime you want. Why, anything you want to do is just fine with me here you over motivated genius you. You can even come back right now if you want to.”
“Well no,” Scop says hurriedly, “well no but thank you very much, I want you to know that I appreciate it, you’re certainly being very kind,” and he starts to back toward the door, the door enormous in his consciousness if not in reality; he has to get to the door, his desire to leave the room is overwhelming and yet he tries to do this with a certain minimal grace, a grace which will cover the acute and deadly awkwardness he feels having been seen at last for what he is . . . a simple and martyred man. He would not have imagined that there would be so much acceptance in the world, not for such as he. At the door he hesitates for a moment; he must confront, after all, the implacable and deadly corridor and he does not know where he is. The situation outside of the highly-defined arena of the room remains ambiguous; it is difficult for him to know exactly how he will come to terms with what is outside.
But he is hopeful. Hopeful and encouraged by what has happened: not the sexuality, not the release but the acceptance. The acceptance has been crucial, it has keyed in upon certain buried needs and made him feel more truly himself than he has for a long time. “Thank you very much,” he says. He whisks open the door. “I really appreciate this very much,” he says and steps out into the blind but overwhelming corridor and his last vision of her is as she throws him a kiss, the arc of her hand describing a pattern in the air which might be grace itself. “Historyis redemption,” she says and then he is gone.
CHAPTER XI
PAIN LIKE TEARS: “Give me that Aeschleyus quote again,” Scop said conversationally to Robert Kennedy. It was three nights before the California campaign’s end and Kennedy was lying on the bed in his hotel room, shoeless, tie less and in that easy stage between sleep and consciousness where all things, even apparitions from the future seemed possible. Scop knew that the candidate was neither astonished nor disconcerted. No word appeared in the histories of this dialogue so that he knew he was safe. “I’d like to hear it.”
