Part 15

“I suppose there _are_ ways. Look what Cave is doing. Of course making death popular is not so difficult since, finally, people _want_ it to be nice: they do the real work or, rather, their terror does. In place of superstition, which they’ve nearly outgrown, he offers them madness.”

“Now really, Clarissa....”

“I don’t disapprove. I’m all for him, as you know. To make death preferable to life is of course utter folly though a perfectly logical reaction for these poor bewildered savages who, having lost their old superstitions, are absolutely terrified at the prospect of nothing. They want to perpetuate their little personalities forever into space and time and now they’ve begun to realize the folly of that (who, after all, are they? are _we_? in creation?) they will follow desperately the first man who pulls the sting of death and Cave is that man, as I knew he would be.”

“And after Cave?”

“I will not say what I see. I’m on the side of change, however, which makes me in perfect harmony with life.” Clarissa chuckled. A fish leaped gayly in the still river; out in the channel a barge glided by, the muffled noise of its engines like slow heartbeats.

“But you think it good for people to follow Cave? you think what he says is right?”

“Nothing is good. Nothing is right. But though Cave is wrong, it is a _new_ wrong and so it is better than the old; in any case, he will keep the people amused and boredom, finally, is the one monster the race will never conquer ... the monster which will devour us in time. But now we’re off the track. Mother love exists because we believe it exists. Believe it does not exist and it won’t. That, I fear, is the general condition of 'the unchanging human heart.’ Make these young girls feel that having babies is a patriotic duty as well as healthful therapy and they’ll go through it blithely enough, without ever giving a second thought to the child they leave behind in the government nursery.”

“But to get them to that state of acceptance....”

“Is the problem. I’m sure it will be solved in a few generations.”

“You think I’m right to propose it?”

“Of course. It will happen anyway.”

“Yet I’m disturbed at the thought of all that power in the hands of the state: they can make the children believe anything; they can impose the most terrible tyranny; they can blind at birth so that none might ever see anything again but what a few rulers, as ignorant as they, finally, will want them to see. There’ll be a time when all people are nearly alike.”

“Which is precisely the ideal society. No mysteries, no romantics, no discussions, no persecutions because there’s no one to persecute. When all have received the same conditioning, it will be like....”

“Insects.”

“Who have existed longer than ourselves and will outlast our race by many comfortable millennia.”

“Is existence everything?”

“There is nothing else.”

“Then likeness is the aim of human society?”

“Call it harmony. You think of yourself only as you are now dropped into the midst of a society of dull conformists. That’s where you make your mistake. You’ll not live to see it for, if you did, you would be someone else, a part of it. No one of your disposition could possibly happen in such a society. There would be no rebellion against sameness because difference would not, in any important sense, exist, even as a proposition. You think: how terrible! but think again how wonderful it would be to belong to the pack, to the tribe, to the race, without guilt or anxiety or division.”

“I cannot imagine it.”

“No more can they imagine you.”

“This will happen?”

“Yes, and you will have been a part of it.”

“Through Cave?”

“Partly, yes. There will be others after him. His work in the future will be distorted by others, but that’s to be expected.”

“I don’t like your future, Clarissa.”

“Nor does it like you, my dear. The idea of someone who is gloomy and at odds with society, bitter and angry, separate from others ... I shouldn’t wonder but that you yourself might really be used as a perfect example of the old evil days.”

“Virtue dies?”

“Virtue becomes the property of the race.”

“Imagination is forbidden?”

“No, only channeled for the good of all.”

“And this is a desirable world? the future you describe?”

“Desirable for whom? For you, no. For me, not really. For the people in it? Well, yes and no. They will not question their estate but they will suffer from a collective boredom which ... but my lips are sealed. Your tea was delicious though the bread was not quite fresh; but then bachelors never keep house properly. I’ve gone on much too long; do forget everything I’ve said. I’m indiscreet. I can’t help it.” She rose, a cloud of gray suspended above the porch. I walked her across the lawn to the driveway where her car was parked. The breeze had, for the moment, died and the heat prickled me unpleasantly; my temples itched as the sweat started.

“Go on with it,” she said as she got into her car. “You may as well be on the side of the future as against it. Not that it much matters anyway. When your adorable President Jefferson was in Paris he said....” But the noise of the car starting drowned the body of her anecdote. I caught only the end: “That harmony was preferable. We were all amused; I was the only one who realized that he was serious.” Dust swirled and Clarissa was gone down the drive at a great speed, keeping, I noticed, to the wrong side of the road. I hoped this was an omen.

5

I got through an unusually sultry July without much interference from either Cave or the world. Paul paid me a quick visit to get the manuscript of the dialogues and I was reminded of those accounts of the progresses made by monarchs in other days, or rather of great ministers, for his party occupied four large cars which gleamed side by side in my driveway like glossy beasts while their contents, Paul and fourteen assistants, all strange to me save Stokharin, wandered disconsolately about the lawn until their departure.

Paul, though brisk, was cordial. “Trouble all over the map but b-i-g t-r-o-u-b-l-e,” he spelled it out with relish, size was important, I knew, to a publicist, even to one turned evangelist.

“Is Cave disturbed by it?”

“Doesn’t pay any attention. Haven’t seen him but Iris keeps me posted. By the way, we’re hiring a plane the first week in August to go see him, Stokharin and me. Want to come along?”

I didn’t but I said I would. I had no intention of being left out of anything: there was _my_ work still to do.

“I’ll let you know details. This is hot stuff?” He waved the sheaf of papers I’d given him.

“Real hot,” I said but my irony was too pale, only primary colors caught Paul’s eye.

“I hope so. Got any new stunts?”

I told him, briefly, about my thoughts on marriage or rather Cave’s thoughts. The literary device was for me to ask him certain questions and for him to answer them or, at least, to ask pointed questions in his turn. Cheerfully, I had committed Cave to my own point of view and I was somewhat nervous about his reaction, not to mention the others. So far, only Clarissa knew and her approval was pleasant but perhaps frivolous: it carried little weight, I knew, with the rest.

Paul whistled. “You got us a tall order. I’m not sure we’ll be able to handle that problem yet, if ever.”

“I’ve done it carefully,” I began.

Stokharin, who had been listening with interest, came to my aid. “In the Centers we, how you say, Paul? soft-pedal the family. We advise young boys to make love to the young girls without marrying or having babies. We speak of the family as a social unit, and society changes. I am most eager to study Mr Luther’s approach. Perhaps a little aid from those of us in clinical work....”

But then the dark sedans began to purr; nervous attendants whispered to Paul and I was soon left alone with the fragments of our brief conversation to examine and interpret at my leisure. I was surprised and pleased at Stokharin’s unexpected alliance. I had thought of him as my chief antagonist. But then, my work finished, I tended roses and read Cassius Dio until the summons in August came.

6

The plane landed on a glare of blue water, more blinding even than the vivid sky about the sun itself which made _both_ elements seem to be a quivering blue fire in which was destroyed all of earth save a tiny smear of dusty faded green, the island of our destination.

The pilot maneuvered the plane against a bone-gray dock where, all alone, Iris stood, her hair tangled from the propellers’ wind and her eyes hidden by dark glasses. Like explorers in a new country, Paul, Stokharin and I scrambled onto the dock, the heat closing in about us like blue canvas, stifling, palpable. I gasped and dropped my suitcase. Iris laughed and ran forward to greet us; she came first to me which, even in my dazzled, shocked state, I realized and valued.

“Gene, you must get out of that suit this minute! and get some dark glasses or you’ll go blind. Paul, how are you? It’s good to see you, Doctor.” And, in the chatter of greetings, she escorted us off the dock and across a narrow white beach to a grove of palm trees where the cottage stood.

To our delight, the interior was cooled by machinery. I sank into a wicker chair even while Cave was pumping my hand. Iris laughed, “Leave him alone, John. He’s smothered by the heat.”

“No hat,” said Cave solemnly after the first greeting which, in my relief, I’d not heard. “You’ll get sunstroke.”

Paul was now in charge. The heat which had enervated both Stokharin and me filled him with manic energy, like one of those reptiles which absorb vitality from the sun.

“What a great little place, John! Had no idea there were all the comforts of home down here, none at all. Don’t suppose you go out much?”

Cave, unlike Iris, was not tanned though he had, for him, a good color, a ruddiness of tone unlike his usual sallowness. “I don’t get too much sun,” he admitted. “We go fishing sometimes, early in the morning. Most of the time I just hang around the house and look at the letters, and read some.”

I noticed on the table beside me an enormous pile of travel magazines, tourist folders and atlases: this had obviously been Cave’s reading. I anticipated trouble.

Paul prowled restlessly about the modern living room with its shuttered sealed windows. Stokharin and I, like fish back in their own element after a brief excursion on land, gasped softly in our chairs while Iris told us of the keys, of their fishing trips. She was at her best here as she had been that other time in Spokane ... being out of doors, in Cave’s exclusive company, brought her to life in a way the exciting busyness of New York did not. In New York she seemed like an object through which an electric current passed; here on this island, in the sun’s glare, she had unfolded, petal after petal until the secret interior seemed almost exposed. I was conscious of her as a lovely woman and, without warning, I experienced desire: that sharp rare longing which, in me, can reach no climax. Always before she had been a friend, a companion whose company I had jealously valued: her attention alone had been enough to satisfy me, but on this day I saw her as a man entire might and I plummeted into despair while talking of Plato.

“The Symposium was the model, yes. There are other ways of casting dialogues such as introducing the celebrated dead brought together for a chat in Limbo. I thought, though, that I should keep the talk to only two. Cave and myself ... Socrates and Alcibiades.” Alcibiades was precisely the wrong parallel but I left it uncorrected, noticing how delicately the hollow at the base of her throat quivered with life’s blood and although I attempted, as I often had before with bitter success, to think of her as so much mortal flesh, the body and its beauty only pulp and bone, only beautiful to a human eye ... hideous, no doubt, to the eye of a geometric progression ... that afternoon I was lost and I could not become, even for a moment, an abstract intelligence again: I saw the bone; I saw the dust, yet I saw her existing, despite her nature and her fate, triumphant in the present. I cursed the flaw in my own flesh and hated life.

“We liked it very much,” she said, not divining my mood, unaware of my sudden passion and its attendant despair.

“You don’t think it’s too strong, do you? All morality, not to mention the churches, will be aligned against us.”

“John was worried at first ... not that opposition frightens him and it is _his_ idea; I mean you wrote the dialogue but it reflects exactly what he’s always thought.” Though in love’s agony, I looked at her sharply to make certain she was perfectly serious: she was; this helped soothe the pain. She had been hypnotized by Cave. I wondered how Clarissa could ever have thought it was the other way around.

“In a way we’re already on record,” Iris looked thoughtfully across the room at Cave who was showing Paul and Stokharin a large map of some strange country. “The Centers have helped a good many couples to adjust to one another without marriage and without guilt.”

“But then there’s the problem of what to do with the children when the family breaks up.”

Iris sighed. “I’m afraid that’s already a problem. Our Centers are taking care of a good many children already. A number, of course, go out for adoption to bored couples who need something to amuse them. I suppose we’ll have to establish nurseries as a part of each Center until, finally, the government assumes the responsibility.”

“_If_ it becomes Cavite.”

“When it becomes Cavite.” She was powerful in her casualness.

“Meanwhile there are laws of adoption which vary from state to state and, if we’re not careful, we’re apt to come up against the law.”

“Paul looks after us,” she smiled. “Did you know that he has nearly a hundred lawyers on our pay roll? All protecting us.”

“From what?” I had not kept track of this.

“Lawsuits ... mostly attempts by state legislatures to outlaw the Centers on the grounds of immorality and so on. The lawyers are kept busy all the time.”

“Why haven’t I read about any of this in the papers?”

“We’ve been able to keep things fairly quiet. Paul is marvelous with the editors ... several have even joined us, by the way ... secretly, of course.”

“What’s the membership now?”

Iris gestured. “No one knows. We have thirty Centers in the United States and each day they receive hundreds of new Cavites. I suspect there are at least four million by now.”

I gasped, beginning to recover at last from the heat, from my unexpected crisis of love. “I had no idea things were going so fast.”

“Too fast. We haven’t enough trained people to look after the Centers and on top of that we’ve got to set up new Centers. Paul has broken the country up into districts, all very methodical: so many Centers per district each with a Resident in charge. Stokharin is taking care of the clinical work.”

“Where’s the money coming from?”

“In bushels from heaven,” Iris smiled. “We leave all that up to Paul. I shouldn’t be surprised if he counterfeits it. One thing I know, though, I _must_ get back to New York soon, to the school. I shouldn’t really have gone off in the middle of everything but I was tired and John wanted company so I came.”

“How is he?”

“As you see: calm. I don’t believe he ever thinks of any of our problems. He never talks about them; never reads the reports Paul sends him. He seldom reads the attacks from the churches and we get several a day, not to mention threatening mail. It’s got so bad that we now have full-time bodyguards.”

“You think people are _seriously_ threatening him?”

“I don’t know how serious they are but we can’t take chances. Fortunately, almost no one knows we’re here and, so far, no cranks have got through from the mainland. We get our groceries and mail brought in by boat every other day from Key Largo. Otherwise, we’re marooned here.”

I looked about me for some sign of the guards but they were elsewhere: a Cuban woman glumly vacuuming in the next room was the only visible stranger.

Cave abandoned his maps and atlases long enough to tell me how much the dialogues pleased him.

“I wish I could put it down like you do. I can only say it when people listen.”

“You feel I’ve been accurate?”

He nodded solemnly. “Oh, yes ... it’s just as I’ve always said it, only written down.” I realized that he’d already assumed full responsibility (and credit, should there be any) for my composition; I accepted his presumption with amusement. Only Stokharin seemed aware of the humor of the situation. I caught him staring at me with a shrewd expression; he looked quickly away and his mouth was rigid as he tried not to smile. I liked him at that moment: we were the only two, evidently, who had not been possessed by Cave. I felt like a conspirator.

For several days we talked, or rather Paul talked. He had brought with him charts and statements and statistics and, though Cave did not bother to disguise his boredom, he listened most of the time and his questions, when they did occur, were apposite. The rest of us were fascinated by the extent of what Paul referred to as the “first operational phase.”

Various projects had already been undertaken; others were put up to the directors for discussion. The mood was, due to Paul’s emphatic personality, more like that of a meeting of account-executives in an advertising firm than the pious foregathering of a messiah’s apostles ... and already that word had been used in the press by the curious as well as by the devout. Cave was the messiah to several million Americans, one not come with fire to judge the world, nor one armed with the instruction of a supernatural being whose presence was elsewhere but whose secret word had been given this favorite son ... no, Cave was of another line: that of the prophets, of the instructors like Jesus before he became Christ, like Mohammed before he became Islam. Cave was the one in our age whose single task it was to speak out, to say the words all men waited for yet dared not speak nor even attend without the overpowering authority of another who had, plausibly, assumed the guise of master. I could not help but wonder as I watched Cave in those hectic conferences if the past had been like this.

Cave certainly had one advantage over his predecessors: modern communications. It took three centuries for Christianity to infest the world. It was to take Cave only three years to conquer Europe and the Americas.

But I did not have this foreknowledge in Florida. I only knew that Paul was handling an extraordinary business in a remarkable way. There was no plan so vast that he could not contemplate its execution with ease. He was exhausting in his energy and, though he did not possess much imagination, he was a splendid improviser, using whatever themes were at hand to create his own dazzling contrapuntal effects with.

We decided upon a weekly magazine to be distributed gratis to the Cavites (I was appointed editor though the real work, of which I was entirely ignorant, was to be done by a crew already at work on the first issue); we determined to send abroad certain films to be shown by Cavite lecturers; we approved the itinerary of Cave’s national tour in the fall (Cave was most alive during this discussion; suggesting cities he wanted particularly to see, reveling in the euphony of such names as Tallahassee); we planned several dinners to be held in New York with newspaper editors and political figures and we discussed the advisability of Cave’s accepting an invitation to be questioned by the Committee on National Morals and Americanism of the House of Representatives, a remarkably powerful Committee which had begun to show an interest in the progress of our Centers. It was decided that Cave delay meeting them until the time was propitious, or until he had received a subpoena. Paul, with his instinctive sense of the theatrical, did not want to have this crucial meeting take place without a most careful build-up.

We discussed the various steps taken or about to be taken by certain state legislatures against the Centers. The states involved were those with either a predominantly Catholic or predominantly Baptist population. Since the Centers had been organized to conform with existing state and federal laws (the lawyers were earning their fees), Paul thought they would have a difficult time in closing any of them. The several laws which had been passed were all being appealed and he was confident of our vindication by the higher courts. Though the established churches were now fighting us with every possible weapon of law and propaganda, we were fully protected, Paul felt, by the Bill of Rights even in its currently abrogated state.

Late in the afternoon after one of the day’s conferences had ended, Iris and I swam in the Gulf, the water as warm as blood and the sky soft with evening. We stayed in the water for an hour, not talking, not really swimming, merely a part of the sea and the sky, two lives on a curved horizon, quite alone (for the others never ventured out), only the bored bodyguard on the dock reminded us that the usual world had not slipped away in a sunny dream, leaving us isolated and content in that sea from which our life had come so long ago ... water to water, I thought comfortably as we crawled up on the beach like new-lunged creatures.

Iris undid her bathing cap and her hair, streaked blonde by the sun (and a little gray as well), fell about her shoulders. She sighed voluptuously. “If it would always be like this.”

“If what?”

“Everything.”

“Ah,” I ran my hand along my legs and crystals of salt glittered and fell; we were both dusted with light. “You have your work,” I added ... with some malice though I was now under control ... my crisis resolved after one sleepless night. I could now look at her without longing, without pain; regret was another matter but regret was only a distant relative to anguish.

“I have that, too,” she said. “The work uses everything while this ... is a narcotic. I float without a thought or a desire like ... like an anemone.”

“You don’t know what an anemone is, do you?”

She laughed like a child. “How do you know I don’t?”

“You said it like somebody reading a Latin inscription.”

“What is it?”

I laughed, too. “I don’t know. Perhaps something like a jellyfish. It has a lovely sound: sea anemone.”

We were interrupted by a motorboat pulling into the dock. “It’s the mail,” said Iris. “We’d better go back to the house now.”

While we collected towels, the guard on the dock helped the boatman carry two large boxes of groceries and mail to the house.

Between a pair of palm trees, a yard from the door of the house, the bomb went off in a flash of light and gray smoke. A stinging spray of sand blinded Iris and me. The blast knocked me off balance and I fell backward onto the beach. For several minutes, my eyes filled with tears and burning from the coral sand, I was quite blind. When I was finally able to see again, Iris was already at the house trying to force open the door.

One of the palm trees looked as if it had been struck by lightning, all its fronds gone and its base smoldering. The windows of the house were broken and I recall wondering, foolishly, how the air-conditioning could possibly work if the house was not sealed. The door was splintered and most of its paint had been burned off: it was also jammed for Iris could not open it. Meanwhile, from a side door, the occupants of the house had begun to appear, pale and shaken.

I limped toward the house, rubbing my eyes, aware that my left knee had been hurt. I was careful not to look at either the boatman or the guard. Their remains inextricably strewn among tin cans and letters in the bushes.