THE DARK OF THE JUNE
Untouched by any change of the last twenty-five years, the Nailer living room continued to reflect (like a lost photograph unexpectedly found between the pages of a book) the tastes of Henry’s late wife, May Nailer. These tastes had been simple but not good, and save for Henry’s old trophies and some tattered physics books, it was just such a room as May might have seen in a newspaper the day she ordered the furniture. To this unpromising setting Henry had added little over the years - though he had collaborated with May, the year after the room was set up, to produce their daughter June. Except for June and her clothing the nineteen-nineties were not so much excluded as denied.
On this spring evening, June wore a soft gown without visible hem or seam, a gown that fell to her ankles and left her right breast bare. On her right wrist was a bracelet of glo-lite bangles and in her right ear a dangling glo-lite earring. The nails of her left hand were red, and those of her right black; her dramatic lashes were her own now, surgically implanted and gracefully long; she was a beautiful girl, Henry thought, although somewhat too slender to look her best in the current fashions. ‘They’re here,’ she said, and he nodded, pretending he had not been looking at her.
‘They really are here,’ his daughter continued as though he had denied it. ‘A translucent thing like a scarf came out of the bedroom and went into the kitchen a moment ago.’
‘I didn’t notice,’ he said.
‘We’re living in a haunted world, Daddy, and it ought to bother you - I know you, and you’re a thoroughgoing materialist whose whole cast of mind was formed before any of this started - but you hardly seem to care.’
‘They’re not dead,’ her father said. He was a broad-shouldered, placid man who wore a black patch over the socket of an eye lost years before in a motorcycle accident; his curly, almost-full beard was going gray. ‘They’re just people.’ He went back to his book.
* * * *
At midnight the lights flickered, a sign that the rates had doubled; Henry waved a hand at Bellini’s Portrait of the Doge Loredano above the fireplace; they went out leaving only the night-light gleam of the bank nearest the stair. He used an old leather bookmark imprinted with an unconvincing dragon to record the fact that he had abandoned An Incident at Krechetovka Station before it had had time to make steam, and went up to bed. There was a note on his pillow, and he called the police.
‘She’s over eighteen?’
Henry nodded.
‘Then there’s nothing we can do.’
‘You could stop her,’ Henry said. ‘You could book her, if that were necessary, on some minor charge, give me time to talk to her, give her time to think.’
‘I could give the city manager a jaywalking ticket too,’ the computer-generated police surrogate said. Henry’s old 3V made him sallow and a trifle unreal, even projecting into the darkened room. ‘But I’m not going to.’
A nothing went past, a luminous wisp that might have been steam from a coffee pot if steam were faintly blue. ‘Look at that,’ Henry said, ‘that might have been her.’ He felt as if he were about to weep, but no tears came, only a greater and greater ache in his chest.
‘I didn’t see it,’ the police surrogate said, ‘but anyway it couldn’t have been that quick. How old did you say she was?’
‘Twenty-three. Junie’s twenty-three, I think.’
‘Then it couldn’t be anywhere near that quick; the older they are the longer it takes, and they flash in and out and fade - that’s why they won’t accept anybody over thirty. Did you call the center?’
Henry looked at him blankly.
‘Didn’t you call the center yet? Call them.’
‘I didn’t think they’d cooperate - they want people to come, don’t they?’
‘They got to tell you for legal purposes - everybody leaves an estate, you know what I mean? I mean she can’t take it with her. Even if it’s just clothes. Turn on your recorder and tell them it’s an official request - they’ll tell you.’
Henry said, ‘It’s not as though they’re dead.’
‘Not to them it ain’t.’ The police surrogate switched off.
Henry coded the center; the girl who answered said, ‘Who is it?’
‘My name is Henry Boyce Nailer-’
‘I mean who’re you looking for? Man or woman?’
‘A woman.’ Henry cleared his throat. ‘Her name is June Nailer, and she’s my daughter.’
The girl flipped through a register on her desk. ‘Recent?’
‘Tonight.’
‘She hasn’t been here. Now don’t you come down trying to make trouble; we won’t even let you in the building.’
Outside the air was soft with the feeling of new growth, the crickets were singing in the grass. He took off the suitcoat he had put on from force of habit and carried it over his shoulder as he strode toward the station; twice black things passed over the broad face of the moon as he walked: one was a whippoorwill; the other a nin - one of them. The nin was like a flying flag, Henry thought, a fluttering banner, this last bit of someone who would soon - in a few months or years - be totally not in nature, the dark flag of a vessel putting out for all the wonders of the night sky. He paid his tokens to the gate and stepped onto the starter belt, then across it to the speedup belt, and then onto the fast belt. Even there at a steady speed of forty kilometers an hour the wind was not cold, but his coat whipped behind him; he was afraid his checkbook would fall out and put the coat on. There were boxes ahead of him, and the boxman came back to ask if he wanted to rent one.
‘I guess you’re surprised I’m still open this late, right, pal? I mean when it ain’t raining or nothing. Well, when I said did you wanna rent a box that was just what I meant - I got a girl in one, you get me? A nice girl. Young. Young. You looking for a girl, bud?’
‘Yes’ Henry said, ‘but not your kind of girl.’ He discovered that he was happy to have someone to talk to, even the box-man.
‘I’d show her to you,’ the boxman said, ‘but she’s taking a little nappy-poo in there between tricks. Listen, if you got any interest I’ll wake her up and show her to you anyhow.’ Henry told him to let his girl sleep and got off in the downtown mall three kilometers down the belt. He had felt an irrational desire, though he would hardly admit it to himself, to see the trans-tart - to order her led yawning out of her box (they were officially called rental-mobile weather shelters, and the boxman paid an annual fee for the privilege of putting each aboard the belts), her makeup smeared with sleep, and the inevitable pink-tinted three mil Saran gown fluttering in the wind. He imagined himself escorting a much younger woman into a restaurant - they would be father and daughter until the other diners saw their hands clasped beneath the table.
* * * *
The building was not that, only a two-floor complex. Amateurish posters in its windows: THE BUTCHERS KILL FOR YOU, AND DO YOU WANT TO BE A PART OF ALL MANKIND HAS DONE, AND LIVE WITHOUT MEAT - IN YOU OR ON YOU - DISINCARNATE, AND RESIGNATION IS THE ONLY WAY OUT - SO I’M RESIGNING. Henry went inside; there was an athletic young man at a desk in the first room, and a softball bat leaning in the corner behind the young man. He said, ‘What do you want?’
‘I want to know if my daughter’s here.’
‘You can’t come farther than this,’ the young man said. ‘There’s a phone on the wall in back of you - call them up inside.’
‘I did,’ Henry told him. ‘Now I’m going to see for myself.’
The young man reached behind him for the softball bat and laid it across his desk. ‘There’s a switch in the seat of this chair, and every time I stand up without shutting it off it rings an alarm in police headquarters. They like for people to go away - they think it reduces the crime rate. They don’t like people who try to stop it; sometimes they shoot them.’
‘Why don’t you go?’
‘I am going,’ the young man said, ‘in November. Someone else I know is going to be ready to go too by then, and we’re going to do it together. Meantime I want to do something right here. We’re going to go, and we’re never going to die.’
‘Something else happens to them,’ Henry said.
‘But not death; they never die. That’s what they say.’
Someone came in behind Henry, a narrow-shouldered young man of about nineteen. He said, ‘This is the place, isn’t it?’ He had an air of desperate triumph, as though he had won through to some frightful goal.
‘This is the place,’ the young man with the ball bat said, and as he did Henry bolted for the inner door, slamming it and locking it behind him.
A man and two women sat talking in a room filled with ashtrays and stale coffee cups; neither of the women was June. As they stared at Henry one flickered out of sight, then, as he found the next door, returned. She might have been traced in neon, and the bright room a dark street.
He burst into a third room, and a young woman (the same young woman, he realized a moment afterward, that he had talked to earlier) said, ‘You’re Mr Nailer?’
He nodded.
‘Good. She’s still on.’ The young woman pressed a switch on the desk before her, and Junie was in the room. ‘Daddy,’ she said.
‘Where are you, honey?’ He recognized the chair in which she sat, the rug around her feet, even as he spoke.
‘Daddy, I’m home. I want to see you before I go.’
He said, ‘Are you going so soon, honey?’ and as he spoke she was flicked away. The 3V was still on; the old wing-backed chair that had been May’s still stood on the patternless blue carpet, but June was no longer there. He waited, watching it, realizing that the young woman at the desk was watching too.
‘She may return in a few seconds,’ the young woman said, ‘but she may not. If you want to see her in person I’d go back home if I were you.’
Henry nodded and turned to step back into the room of stale coffee cups. A plainclothesman hit him in the mouth as he came through the door; he fell to his knees from the shock, and was jerked to his feet again. He hit the plainclothesman in the stomach, kneed him, then grabbed his lapels and smashed his nose with his forehead. Somehow the plainclothesman’s gun was no longer attached to him and went skittering across the floor. A uniformed patrolman was coming through the door Henry had to go out of; he made the mistake of diving for the gun, and Henry hit him in the back of the neck.
* * * *
When he stepped off the belt he was still panting. He reflected on how difficult it was for a man his age to keep in condition; they could discover who he was easily enough - though perhaps they wouldn’t make too much trouble about it - it shouldn’t be pleasant for them to confess they had been beaten by a middle-aged scholar. Or perhaps they would; with Junie gone he really didn’t care.
* * * *
She met him at the gate. ‘It’s past your bedtime, Dad. You shouldn’t have gone into the city at this time of night.’
He said: ‘The sun’ll be up in two, three more hours. I think I’ll just stay up now.’
‘To be with me as long as you can - isn’t that it?’
He nodded.
‘What do you want to do?’
‘Let’s just walk in the garden. For a minute.’ Her left hand was in his, and he could see the faint glow of her bracelet when she raised her right hand to touch her hair, the shine of her earring when she turned to look at him. ‘When you were a little girl I used to think about your dying,’ he told her. ‘You do, you know, with children; you were so fragile. And your mother had just died. Now I’ll never see you dead, and I’m glad; I want you to know that.’
‘I’ll never see you dead either, Dad. That was part of it.’
‘What was the rest of it?’
‘All you expected of me, a little. And ...’
She was gone, her hand no longer in his. ‘June!’ he yelled.
‘June!’ He ran past the stone birdbath and saw the twinkle of her bracelet and earring under the willow; then the little lights winked out one by one.