Green Eyes

  For several days Jocundra worried that Donnell had learned something about his own situation from Magnusson’s death. She picked up a change in him, a change too slippery and circumstantial to classify. On the surface it appeared to have affected him in a positive way: he redoubled his efforts at walking; his social attitudes improved, and he went poking about the house, striking up conversations with the orderlies; he finished his story and started a new one. But when they talked - and they talked far less often than before - the exchanges were oddly weighted. One afternoon he sat her down and had her read his story. It was a violent and involuted fantasy set upon a world with a purple sun, specifically within a village bounded by a great forest, and it dealt with the miserable trials of an arthritic old tradesman, his vengeance against an evil queen and her black-clad retinue, eerie magic, grim conclusions for all. The circuitous plot and grisly horrors unsettled Jocundra. It was as if a curl of purple smoke had leaked out of the manila folder and brought her a whiff of some ornate Persian hell.

  ‘It’s beautifully written,’ she said, ‘but there’s too much blood for my taste.’

  ‘Yeah, but will it sell?’ He laughed. ‘Got to make a living somehow when I get out of here. Right?’

  ‘I prefer your poetry.’ She shut the folder and studied a fray in her skirt.

  ‘No money in poetry.’ He walked to the desk and stood over her, forcing her to look at him. ‘Seriously, I’d like to have your opinion. I want to live in the city for a change, travel, and that takes money. Do you think I can earn it this way?’

  She could only manage a puny, ‘Yes, I suppose,’ but he appeared satisfied with her answer.

  Donnell’s new independence allowed Jocundra to cultivate her distance. Though the cameras continued to break down - ‘Like some damn bug’s in the wires,’ said the maintenance man - the orderlies kept track of his comings and goings, and each morning she put on shorts and a T-shirt, took a blanket and found a sunny spot in which to pass the day. She pored over graduate school catalogs, thinking she might go after her doctorate at Michigan or Chicago, or maybe Berkeley. Within a couple of years she could be doing her field work. Africa. Thatched huts on a dusty plain, baobab trees and secretary birds, oracular sacrifices and tattooing rituals, great fireball sunrises, the green mountains still full of gorillas and orchids and secret kingdoms. Each noon she could almost believe that Shadows was the seat of a lost African empire or some empty Eden; the grounds were deserted, the only sounds were those of insects and birds, and the sunlight hung in gauzy shafts straight down through the canopy, as if huge golden angels were beaming down from their orbiting ark to seed civilization. She drowsed; she read ethnography, the French theorists, rediscovering an old emnity for the incomprehensible Jacques Lacan, reacclimating her mind to the rigorous ingrown language of academics. But after a while, after a shorter while each day, it grew boring in the sun and Donnell would stray into her thoughts. Drowsy, nonspecific thoughts, images of him, things he had said, as if he were brushing against her and leaving bits of memory clinging.

  May the 18th was her mother’s birthday. She had forgotten it until an orderly in the commissary asked her for the date, but all through dinner she thought about what her family might have done to celebrate. Probably nothing. Her father might have given her mother a present, mumbled a tepid endearment and gone out onto the porch to twang his guitar and sing his sad, complaining songs. Her mother would have tidied the kitchen, put on her frumpy hat and scurried off to church for a quick telling of the beads, for fifteen minutes of perfumed darkness at the chipped gilt feet of the Virgin. The Church had been her one stab at individualism, her single act of rebellion against her husband, who had been an atheist. Not that he had tried to dominate her. She had slipped into his shadow like a fearful mouse who had been searching her whole life for such a shelter and would be happy to scuttle around his feet forever. It annoyed Jocundra when she noticed incidences of her mother’s character in herself.

  After dinner she had intended to go to the staff meeting - the big showdown, it was rumored, between Brauer and Edman - but Donnell asked her to stay and talk. He had her sit on the bed and himself leaned against the windowledge, his cane propped beside him. For a long time he was silent, merely staring at her, but finally he said, ‘We’re having a private conversation. The cameras quit working.’

  His stare unnerved Jocundra; it was calm and inquisitive and not the usual way he looked at her. ‘How do you know?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter.’ He gave a sniff of amusement. ‘They have enough data on my psychological adjustment, and besides, my adjustment’s complete. I’m ready to leave right now.’