She knew when the car passed her that she had seen it and the four men in it before, had seen it and paid no attention, for now, trying hard, thinking hard, she couldn’t remember when it had passed, only that it had. The car passed her and slowed down, and in the back window two faces turned, toward each other at first, choreographed precisely, nose to nose, then nose to window, eyes on her. She slowed to fifty, forty. One of the men looking at her said something, the other laughed. The car ahead had passed her doing sixty-five, and now it was keeping two cars’ lengths in front of her. She could outdistance it. She was sure. If they let her get around them. Hers was a new Buick, less than a year old, and the other one, she didn’t know what it was, only that it looked older, and was dirty, very used-looking. She should write down the license number. Groping in her purse she saw a third car appear in her rear-view mirror. It was coming fast. Witnesses. She pushed the accelerator hard and whipped out into the other lane to pass; the car with the four men in it picked up speed also. Seventy, seventy-five, a truck was coming, a dazzling red speck in the brilliant sunlight. She jammed the gas pedal to the floor and pulled ahead of the older car, swung back in, and began to pull away from it. The driver gave up and the car began to diminish in her rear-view mirror, then was passed by the new one that was drawing up to her steadily. She didn’t want to have to drive so fast but she wanted the new car between her and the other one until she got to the next town or city, or telephone, in a pinch. She held seventy cautiously, slowing on curves and where the road vanished in a dip ahead of her, and presently the driver behind her became impatient and touched his horn, then pulled . . .
Maiya walks across the living room and sinks gracefully onto the couch. Her movements are fluid, her appearance almost boneless, a curve of lines without angles . . . No.
Maiya sits upright, tense, ready, anxious to help in any way. She is aware of the importance of the interview, and she is impatient with them when they query her about her fatigue . . . No.
Maiya walked into the kitchen and checked the coffee and finger sandwiches, wrapped in plastic cooling in the refrigerator. She looked at the tray and wondered: Should I offer them gin and tonic instead?
Should she offer anything? She bit her lip, then had to go to the bathroom to inspect her face and apply more of the pale, pale pink lipstick. She lowered her eyelids and tilted her head and put a trace of a smile on her lips only, her eyes remaining sad and knowing.
Maiya lets them talk around her, cool, distant, remote even, and when she answers one of the many questions, it is in a low voice that is tightly controlled. She gives no hint of the tumult she is feeling . . . No.
She remembered that she hadn’t decided about the gin and tonic, and she took the bottle from the shelf and considered it. It was a hot day, but of course the apartment was pleasantly air-conditioned. They might be hot when they arrived. In air-conditioned cars? From air-conditioned offices? She paced the apartment. Kitchen. Hall. Living room. Bedroom. Bath. Closet. Kitchen. Full circle. She put the gin away and counted the cups on the tray. Eight. All of her good cups. Too many. Four of them and her, possibly five of them. Probably five, but one at least would refuse coffee, gin too, if she decided on impulse to offer it. She might; she should be ready for the possibility that she would do just that, but that would mean having a second tray ready, and that would look gauche.
“It is gauche not to have wine with dinner, that’s why the rose,” she said furiously to Hank.
“Honey, who’re you trying to kid? Jack and Susan will have beer before we eat, maybe they’ll want beer with dinner.”
She should have bought some beer. Even executives liked beer in hot weather. She yanked the plug from the coffeepot. She wouldn’t offer them anything.
Maiya admits them to the small, well-kept apartment and murmurs her appreciation. . . .
She should have told them not to come, that they couldn’t come now or ever. She hadn’t dared. She looked out the window at the street seven stories below, white concrete glaring in the sunlight, green plants in pink planters, neat palm trees throwing shadows on neat lawns. The shadows were like whirligigs. Child on tricycle, in and out of the stick shadows, in and out, dark, light, dark, light, in and out. Her dress was white, a glare when she came from the shadow into the sun, an eye-hurting flash of white. She throbbed against Maiya’s eyes, in and out, in and out.
Although she drove with fierce concentration, now and then the other car began to grow in her mirror and she would realize with a feeling of terror that she had let up on the gas, that she had slowed down to her customary sixty-five, and she would again do seventy or more and sigh when the other car began to fade out of sight. It swelled, then shrank, filled the mirror with its image, dwindled to a dot . . . The roads were so straight, so untraveled. Desert, plains, sunlight, white concrete ribbon, an occasional car or truck from the other direction. And the car behind her that threatened constantly to catch up, to pass her, only to slow down so that the faces could turn to regard her through the rear window. But what could they do? It was daylight, on a public road that had no turnoffs anywhere, that just went on and on to vanish into the sky white with sun straight ahead.
The very small dab of a girl had got to the corner and turned carefully and was now pedaling back down the sidewalk, in and out of the shadows. Maiya pulled the drapes shut and immediately the room was softened, looked more spacious and felt cooler. Living room: couch, two Danish modern chairs, television-stereo console, two wooden chairs, ash-colored cocktail table, end tables, bare floor except for the conversation rug, crescent shaped, flame colored (she had made it from a rug kit), two table lamps, white china bases, white shades, orange drapes, ivory walls, black throws on the couch and chairs. Spotless, shining. Wax and furniture polish fragrant. Kitchen: gleaming black and white floor, chrome table legs, white cover, polished coffeepot, toaster, mixer, orange and black crockery. She poured a cup of the cooling coffee and returned to the living room with it. She didn’t have to let them in. She sat down on the black couch and sipped cooling coffee and wished she had been able to say no.
Maiya leans back wearily, her slender white neck barely able to support her head, her hands thin, but quiet on her lap, patience and suffering evident on her pale face, etched in violet under her eyes.
“My dear,” Dr. Whitman says gently, “we know you’ve been through a lot. We’ll try to be brief. Can you tell us what happened now?”
“I don’t know,” she says in a low voice, shutting her eyes against the nightmare that is out there. “An accident. Hank was working so hard, studying . . .”
Books. She hurried to the bedroom and dragged the carton of books from the closet where she had put it and took the top six books without noticing what they were. She put them on tables in the living room, picked one up and put it on the couch, opened, face down. The room looked cluttered suddenly. She picked up the three magazines that were on the cocktail table and took them to the bedroom and left them on top of the carton. The House Beautiful opened when she put it down and she stared at the double spread: a pool seen through a window wall, a fire in a fireplace that filled a second wall, low couches, plants that reached the high ceiling, lots of brass . . . “Goddammit, will you get it through your head. We can’t afford a bigger apartment now. We can’t afford this apartment. I am a file clerk! Not a junior executive! How much room do we need?”
“You’ve been going to school for years now, learning engineering. You aren’t going to be a file clerk all your life. It makes a difference where you live, how people think about you. If we invite Mr. and Mrs. Morrison . . .”
“We aren’t going to invite Mr. and Mrs. Morrison. They wouldn’t come if we did. Look, doll, don’t push too hard. Okay?”
“But you will go back to school when the term starts, won’t you?”
“I don’t think so, honey. I want time out. I want to think and rest and think some more.”
“You see,” Maiya says softly, looking into Dr. Whitman’s face, “he was very ambitious, and very brilliant.” She looks beyond him to Mr. Morrison and Mr. Jeffries, the security man. “He could understand everything,” she says, and closes her eyes again. But not before she sees the quick glance that the two men exchange.
No! No! NO!
Fool, she whispered fiercely. Stop it. You don’t know anything!
Maiya took her cup back to the kitchen, washed and dried it and hung it on the turntable rack for eight cups and saucers. She stared at the cups and gave the rack a turn, sending them out and around. Black and orange, black and orange.
The other car was gaining very slowly. Why couldn’t she lose it? A foolish thought. Where could she lose it? Straight road, white concrete ribbon with false water slicks and heat swirls rising, plains and desert, everything aglare and painful against her eyes, no turnoffs for twenty-five miles or more. She forgot how far it was to the next town. She wished she could study the road map. Say twenty-five miles, less than half an hour away. The car could pull around then and slow down and they could ogle her if they chose, it wouldn’t matter. But if it was fifty miles, she would have to stop for gas first. There would be a solitary station along the road; a wide-board shack with two pumps outside, ancient cans of oil behind sand-pitted windows, sign to Ladies Room, Gents Room, and the sun burning down on it all. She would stop for gas and they would go by, and presently she would leave the crummy station, not rushing because they were ahead of her now. One-room station, with Ladies and Gents and nothing else, not even a snack bar, nothing. She could tell the man there:
“They’re following me, pulling around and slowing down when they can, and ...” And what? They were probably physicists going back to White Sands after a fishing trip. Or a group of doctors homeward bound from an A.M.A. meeting. Even doctors could look sinister through a back car window, smiling at their own jokes about broken legs, or deliveries, or kidney removals.
“Hank, what’s this?” She held out a plastic tube of pink capsules.
“Oh, that. The superintendent sent me over to see Doc Whitman today. He gave me those, help me sleep temporarily.”
“Sleeping pills? You didn’t tell me you were still having trouble.”
“Nothing serious. They’re mild. He kidded me about them, said it’s what they give to children who’re due for tonsillectomies, that mild.”
“Ever since the transfer. Since you started in Dr. Ullster’s department. Don’t you like it there?”
“Honey, knock it off, huh? Come on, let’s go swimming.”
“You used to tell me about the work, what was going on there, what you were doing. You never say any more.”
“I told you, it’s classified. I took the oath.”
“But me?”
“You too, honey. Now let’s go.”
Ullster was a mathematician, a theoretical mathematical physicist, to be precise. The newspaper said so when his move into the company was announced. Hermann Ullster. No more was said. There was a big shakeup; men were transferred to work in his department from other sections. Computer time was rearranged drastically. Ullster had seven programmers under him.
Coming home from the pool, Hank said, “They might insist that we move inside the complex soon.”
Her heart pounded and she was afraid to look at him, afraid he would see the excitement on her face. She waited a moment then said, “Is it official?”
“Not yet. Hadley was surprised when he learned that I’m still on the outside and working in Ullster’s section. He’ll take it up with them next week.”
His tight voice, gaze fixed on the road ahead of them, hands hard on the wheel, furious with them at the complex, furious with himself, for being told he would have to move, ordered to come inside the complex. She knew. But the complex!
Luxuriant apartments, some single houses, some duplexes, its own stores, restaurants, bowling lanes, swimming pools, putting greens . . .
She shopped in Goldwater’s for a dress to mark the occasion, a simple sleeveless linen, pale yellow. Fifty-nine ninety-five. She took it home and hid it.
Maiya, lovely in her pale lemon-colored dress that was superb with her rich tan and honey-toned hair, self-possessed and cool, stands in the doorway and looks them over appraisingly as they enter the apartment and find seats. One, Morrison, president of the research corporation, doesn’t sit down. He studies her as carefully as she examines them. He nods. He motions to the group of men and two of them leave quietly, three others remaining.
“What’s your price?” Morrison asks.
“One percent in the company,” Maiya says easily. She moves to the table and gets a cigarette and waits for him to light it for her. He does and she blows a perfect smoke ring. “Plus fifty thousand cash within ten days.”
Maiya thought of Morrison whom she had seen at one time from a distance. Corpulent, a giant, with a head as big as a basketball and shining bald. He would fill the living room all by himself; she would be like a single wreath of pale smoke beside such a man. With one sweep of his hand he could disperse her, make her vanish forever, and he wouldn’t even notice that she had been there and was gone.
“Honey, I think this is what I want to do. I’ll have to start low, but that’s all right. I’ll have my degree in two years, and meanwhile I’ll be part of it. They’re doing research and making plans for the uses of the ocean floor and for the planets when the time comes. Food, fuel, medicines, who knows what they’ll come up with from research like this?”
Hank, twenty-three, ex-GI, ex-many things, nothing. Starting salary $98.75 per week. Up to $135.45 after a year and a half. The apartment was $160.00 per month. Quitting school with only half a year to go. Stopping the flow of communication that he had maintained with Maiya since they had been married four years ago.
Maiya on the couch, waiting for the visitors, twenty-four, thinking about fifty thousand dollars. Not-thinking about Hank again and again, resolutely not-thinking about Hank. Fifty thousand dollars. He had lived in the Village on nothing, he said. Air, words, ideas? Handouts? What was fifty thousand dollars to him? Not-thinking of Hank. She could go to New York or Miami, and . . . And what? Having the money was what she thought of, not what she would do with it, where she would go with it. Having it, and not-thinking of Hank.
Hank, looking out the window during the night. “There’s a crazy moon. Look at it, honey. Big as a house out there.” Moonlight on the desert, blue light that almost let you see, like a half-remembered image from a fairy tale where you didn’t have to think about the reality or unreality of a castle floating on water. Hank, naked at the window, unreal in the same pale light, playing his guitar, singing softly: “. . . and what have you built, when you’ve built a bomb? You’ve built hurt and pain and suffering anon . . .”
“Hank, stop it! Come on to bed.”
Sometimes she didn’t know him, couldn’t think why she had married him, where they were going or why.
Not-thinking of Hank in bed with her. Especially not-thinking of Hank in bed with her.
Maiya weeps bitterly and can’t answer their questions, can’t speak. Dr. Whitman motions them angrily from the room and sits by her side and pats her shoulder awkwardly. “I know, my dear. Hank told me what a wonderful life you had together. You will have to be brave now. It isn’t going to be easy for you.” No!
Maiya jerked when somewhere a clock struck four. It was almost time. She returned to the kitchen and stood with her hand on the plug to the coffeepot. Hank’s papers. What if they wanted his papers? She ran to the bedroom and yanked open the top bureau drawer and snatched notebooks and loose papers up in both hands. Where could she put them? She started for the bed, then stopped. But where? Bedroom, living room, kitchen, bath...She ran to the bathroom and started to tear up the papers into tiny fragments. Limericks, bits of verse, songs, letters. All very, very dirty. She flushed them down the toilet.
A film of perspiration had broken out on her forehead and she blotted it with Kleenex moistened with skin freshener. What would they have thought of her?
Why were they coming?
What did they want from her?
She thought of the concrete road again and walked back to the living room and sat down once more. It was so bright! On her way from the university where they’d had a housekeeping unit, to Mesa, Arizona, where Hank had his new job. Miles and miles of plains, desert, white bright sky, and the car with four men in it that kept edging closer and closer so that she couldn’t relax, couldn’t let down her guard a moment. Everything connected to everything else. A skein of wool with millions of threads, so that it didn’t matter which one you followed, you ended back in the middle. Hank had said that, not Maiya. She shook her head violently. Not-thinking of Hank. The car followed closer going up the mountain roads. She couldn’t help it, she had to slow down. If only she knew exactly what it was she was running from. Maybe they weren’t even threatening her, just happened to be going in the same direction, at about the same speed.
“Honey, all my life I’ve wanted to make things, you know? Model cars when I was a kid, then string wires into bottles and make lamps, put tubes together and come up with a radio or a hi-fi. Like that. I like to take things and put them together and come up with something new and useful, and even pretty.” He got out of the army in California and walked across the country to New York where they met and were married three weeks later. “No kids for awhile, okay with you?”
She had nodded, relieved. No kids now, maybe never. She teased him about it, though: You’re the guy that wants to make things, but not kids.
Nothing that would hurt, he’d said. She knew she had looked blank, and he had pushed her over backward in the bed and was on top of her with a scissors-lock . . . Not-thinking of Hank and her in bed together. God, not that ...
Hairpin curves, thirty miles an hour, the other car half a city block away. Almost see their expressions now, one in the back seat leaning over the front seat, his chin on his arms, looking ahead, looking at her.
Maiya is so young, so vulnerable. “I tried,” she says desperately. “I wanted him to stay on and go back to school. I wanted him to make something of himself. When he told me what he planned, I was terrified. He was sick. He needed help. You have to understand that.”
Morrison, looming over her, blotting out the light, his voice everywhere in the room, says, “He was a traitor, an agent. And you were his accomplice.”
“NO!” she cries, and her innocence is so apparent that even Morrison is moved into retreating. He mutters to Jeffries, the security man, “She’s okay. Chalk it up as an accident, give her the usual pension. Let’s go.”
He was sick. Feverish, restless, pacing, in bed and up, again and again.
“Hank, what is the matter? What happened?”
“Nothing. Go back to sleep.”
“How can I?” She pulled her robe on, chilled in the air-conditioned room. “At least tell me what happened.”
Hank, muttering like a drunk, or a sleepwalker, some of the words coming through, not enough: “. . . doesn’t matter what you try to do, all ends up in the middle, all connected, wound around each other . . .”
She caught his arm and pulled him to a stop. “What happened?”
“Ullster is working on developing a mathematical approach to mental disease, and at the same time, on a mathematical approach to an electronic mind wave that would turn a man into a walking corpse in an instant.” Hank put his hand over hers on his bare arm. His hand was hot and dry. “We’re minting coins out there at the complex,” he said. “And each and every one of them has two heads.” His hand tightened on hers. “And I don’t know which mouth I’m feeding,” he said harshly.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. You’ve been smoking pot or something.”
He flung her hand away and went to the window. “I know you don’t know. Would it matter if you did? Would it matter?” He almost cried when he said that.
She stood in the doorway staring at his silhouette against the pale light of the full moon on the desert. Then she turned and went back to bed. Much later she heard his soft voice and his guitar, but she didn’t get up.
She looked about suddenly. For a moment she thought she had heard it again, only the elevator down the hall. She remembered the funny words he had made up that night: “Oh, they’ll tell you the story of a little file clerk; They’ll say that one day he went all berserk, That he raided the files and made a high pyre. That he lay down on top to take his rest there ...”
They caught up with her halfway down the mountain. When she got out of her car and faced them, she said, “What do you want? I’m out of gas, there wasn’t any place I could stop. Will you take me to the next town, to the complex where my husband works?”
One of them doubled over, laughing. “No place to stop! You drove like hell through town after town, past crossroad after crossroad. Honey, you didn’t want to stop.”
Maiya heard the steps in the hallway and she stood up. They were on time.
Maiya admits them graciously, wordlessly, and as they enter they murmur words of condolence. . . .
The buzzer rasped at her. She fumbled with the lock, then got the door open.
“Mrs. Brewster, I’m Dr. Whitman. How do you do.” He stepped aside and the two other men entered. “Mr. Fields, our company attorney, and Jack Arcana, of course, you know already.”
She nodded and made a motion to close the door.
Mr. Fields said, “Mrs. Brewster, we’ve come to talk to you about the terrible accident at the complex, to explain what your rights are, and primarily to offer, to urge you to accept our help at this difficult time.”
Jack Arcana cleared his throat. “Maiya,” he said, “if there’s anything we, Susan and I can do, you know . . .”
She looked at him and shook her head. She said dully, “Mary. My name is Mary.” Then she sat down and waited for them to tell her what to do.