Free The Outcasts by Stephen Becker Page B

again like rot in his mouth. “I tried to cover her up, and I remember her breasts shivering. It was in the afternoon. Then I just ran.”
    â€œYou should not dwell on it,” Philips said.
    â€œNo. With a fine war in between, and so forth, you’d think I’d have forgotten by now. But I wake up sometimes,” he burst out, “and the shame is awful. Not that I got caught with a girl and not that I was whipped; but that I ran and left her. I never saw her again. My God,” he groaned, “we never even finished.”
    â€œThat was more than a quarter of a century ago,” Ramesh said. “We all hurt people. We all hate to remember hurting. But if you are clever enough to be an engineer, you are clever enough to survive such a silly thing.”
    â€œOh no,” Morrison said. “I’m not clever. I’m not really smart at all. Except with numbers, maybe, shapes, spaces. I’m slow. I like being slow but I don’t know enough. About myself even.” Many brilliant men skittered across the surface of his century and he could not say that he understood them, their intensity, their nervousness, the stuttering light they shed. Nor could he say that he had tried very hard to understand them. When he wrestled ponderously with a new idea, he was always disappointed to find that it was an old idea. Or nonsense. Brilliant men seemed proud and defensive and so could not be trusted. “I’m not even making sense, I suppose.” He had built a highway in the northern autumn, riding a grader sleepily and happily among elms and maples, brown in the V of his shirt, and it was a time of great crisis, or so said the newspapers, and he rode his grader aware that the earth might gape to engulf him but taking it on faith that a road was worth building. “Faith. I don’t know what that is. Everybody has to die but nobody has to break his word.” He stopped short. After an embarrassed and burbling swig he went on: “Don’t laugh at me. I was a faithful husband. Twice.”
    â€œNow you are bragging.” Philips smiled. “But I know what you are getting at, I think. You are wondering how long until the next catastrophe.”
    â€œYes. Yes. You remember King Midas? I feel like a new kind of Midas, a twentieth-century Midas: except when I’m working, everything I touch turns to carrion. Senecas and redwoods and wives.”
    â€œWhat are Senecas?” Ramesh asked.
    â€œSenecas are people who believe promises.”
    â€œAnd what are wives?” Philips asked.
    Morrison was silent.
    â€œThey were unfaithful?”
    â€œBoth of them,” he cried in sudden outrage. “Nobody cares any more. Even about that. They were upset that I minded.”
    â€œHere we do not worry so much about that,” Philips said. “Maybe you were not so good with women.”
    â€œI guess not,” Morrison mumbled, knowing that for the truth. “Both times it lasted two years.” His heart quailed then and he went on: “All right: the second one was only a repeat. Desperation. My fault. But I loved my first wife. The way,” he stumbled, “the way they tell you you ought to love truth and justice and things like that.”
    â€œTruth and justice are not things,” Philips said. “What happened?”
    â€œI wish I knew. It was wild for about a year and then—oh, hell!” He wrenched the words out: “There was somebody else all the time. And we kept on trying for another year and finally I hated her.” He sat back empty. “She was all flesh. Nothing but flesh.” And I am growing old and not worth much these days. Not for a year now. He heard the words but knew that he had not said them aloud.
    â€œSo are you,” Philips said. “What is wrong with that?”
    â€œThe flesh is nothing,” Ramesh said.
    â€œThe flesh is everything,” Philips said. “You should have beaten