Free Gray Matters by William Hjortsberg Page B

that its absence alone provides a definition of damnation. Itubi’s rage explodes in the face of this final indignity. He smashes the tubular glass casket with a sideswipe of his machine-tooled fist, reaching in for the Tropique with eager pneumatic fingers.
    Skeets clears his snorkle of sea water, spouting like a dolphin in the bay. He rolls on his back and studies the shore through his water-streaked face mask: the snowlike dazzle of the beach and the jagged line of hills, green as a hummingbird’s throat. When he was eight, his parents took him on a Caribbean cruise. For years afterward the ornate shells and bits of staghorn coral occupied a place of honor on his dresser, and the memory of swimming in the jewel-pure clarity of that incredible water haunted him like a recurring dream. He is grateful to his Auditor for uncovering this magic bit of the past.
    Vera, of course, lived for years in the Caribbean, but although she is reminded of Grenada, she is unable to identify their island. Skeets waves to her on the beach. He thinks of how she will smile when she sees the langouste he has speared. A few yards away, the Sand Dab III rides at anchor. This afternoon they will take her for a sail. Skeets can’t imagine life getting any finer.
    Languidly, Vera rubs her golden arms and legs with coconut oil. She watches Skeets swim in the emerald water, the black upthrust of his flippered feet as he dives. A pattern of crab tracks surrounds her in the sand; palm fronds ripple like sail canvas in the even breeze. She has never known such happiness; their island is more beautiful than anything imagined in the solitude of her cranial container. The shelter Skeets lashed together out of driftwood uprights and palm thatch is bordered with queen conch shells and bowered by bougainvillea and hibiscus, and tall stands of lethal oleander.
    Vera has lost all track of time. It doesn’t matter; memory-merge is like a dream. The passage of weeks and months may account for only a few hours in the Depository, so it’s futile to pay attention to time. Once, an Auditor instructed her to meditate on the nature of time. She remembers his lesson. Time is an abstraction devised by man to regulate the illusion he calls reality; the past, the present, and the future are happening Now; this very moment is all there is. Understanding each moment is the key to Liberation. Vera was never much good at her lessons, but as the days blend into weeks and the weeks into months, the deposit drawer seems another dimension away and the suntanned young actress decides that her Auditor was right about time after all.
    OBU
Obu
ITUBI
Itubi
OBU
Obu
ITUBI
Itubi
OBU
Obu
ITUBI
Itubi
OBU
Obu
ITUBI
Itubi
OBU
Obu
ITUBI
Itubi
OBU
Obu
ITUBI
Itubi
OBU
Obu
    The sound of his own name echoing and re-echoing in the vaulted chamber is more arresting than an alarm signal, more alluring than the sweetest music:
Obu Itubi …
    It has been over seventy-five years since he last heard his name pronounced. “Be careful, Obu,” his wife had whispered that fateful morning when he set out to find food for their renegade mountain band. “Don’t let anything happen to you, my own Obu. If you should fail to return I would be so alone. Isn’t it better that we all die together, not alone and afraid.” When she kissed him goodbye, her lips formed the shape of his name for the final time. He never saw her again. In the Depository he was called only by number: B-0489.
    The hidden loudspeaker continues to broadcast his name again and again as Itubi listens, entranced. The Tropique hangs from the Amco-pak’s steel grip like a chipmunk caught in the talons of a hawk. His anger subsides, the rage is calmed. Itubi switches on his own broadcast equipment and adjusts the voice-range control of his speech center.
    All right … I hear you … What? (Itubi is having some trouble with feedback interference and he fiddles with the controls of his eliminator.) … All right, I can hear you.
    OBU ITUBI.