The Comedy is Finished

involved with their own problems to watch non-essential television. Mark could be seen through the glass doors, prowling back and forth out there on the beach, brooding at the sand and ignoring the Pacific’s huge sunset. Liz did her brooding curled up in an Eames chair near the fireplace, her back to both the view and the TV. Larry had locked himself into the bedroom with Koo, Joyce was in the kitchen fretfully and compulsively preparing food no one wanted—cups of coffee, pots of soup, plates of sandwiches cut into triangles with the crusts meticulously removed—and Peter and Ginger were bickering together. “This is very bad of you,” Ginger kept saying. “Very bad. Very bad.” His monkey cheerfulness was gone, as though it had never been, replaced by a fidgety snapping, like a neurotic lapdog. Even his face was now the pinched countenance of a Lhasa Apso or Yorkie. “It’s just too bad of you, Peter.”

“There wasn’t any choice,” Peter said, for the hundredth time. He knew he had to placate Ginger somehow, but it was all so difficult. His cheeks burned and stabbed, he kept swallowing blood, and for the first time in years he was blinking. The very symptom he had so long ago conquered by gnawing his cheeks had now returned, completely out of his control. Following Ginger from room to room, prowling with him, trying to smooth things over, he ground his cheeks while his eyelids blink-blink-blinked, and through it all he just kept talking: “I knew they’d be back, and I was right. We got Davis out of there just in time.”

“To bring him here. Oh, Peter, this is so bad of you. After all you said, about keeping me out.”

“What else could I do? We can’t drive the goddamn man around in the car forever. Did you want me to kill him?”

Ginger, walking down the hallway toward the kitchen with Peter in his wake, abruptly stopped and turned back, so that Peter nearly bumped into him. “Don’t talk to me about killing,” Ginger said. “Don’t talk to me about killing.”

“That’s what Mark wanted to do,” Peter said, bitterness in his voice. Things weren’t working out. If he’d only walked in on Mark and Davis a few minutes later the problem would have been solved, taken out of Peter’s hands. That Mark had been about to murder Davis Peter had no doubt, though he hadn’t talked about it with either of them, nor did he intend to. He could not himself have ordered Davis killed simply for the convenience of it, but he would have been very pleased—among other reactions—if the decision had been made for him. As to why Mark was so determined to murder Davis, or why Davis on his side was so determined to have conversations with the man thirsting for his death, Peter had no idea what either of them was about, and in truth he felt scant curiosity. His main interest was in himself, and his attention to the outside world waxed or waned as the world impinged on his own desires or needs.

Ginger, with his discontented lapdog face, turned away and continued on to the kitchen, Peter trailing. In the kitchen, Joyce turned from stirring a pot of soup to say, with a chipper kind of lunatic normalcy, “You ought to eat. Both of you.”

“Save something for tomorrow,” Ginger told her irritably, then turned to Peter again, saying, “Or will you be out of here by tomorrow?”

“To go where? Ginger, where else is there?”

“Oh, it’ll all be over by tomorrow,” Joyce said brightly. “You wait and see.”

“We’ll wait,” Ginger said meaningfully, with a glance up at the kitchen clock: seven oh five. “And after we hear what the FBI has to say, then we will see. In the meantime, young woman, kindly stop treating my kitchen as your personal chuck wagon. No one wants all those ditzy little sandwiches. What’s in that pot?”

“Scotch broth.”

“No no, the one behind it, with the lid.”

“Pea soup,” Joyce said, with a first hint of defensiveness. She and the others—except Peter, of course—were all meeting Ginger for the first time. She added, “Not everybody likes Scotch broth.”

“Not everybody likes their larder wasted by a hysterical female,” Ginger told her. “Are you menstruating?”

“What? No, I—No.”

“Then you have no excuse.” Turning to Peter, Ginger said, “Have you control over no one? Nothing?” Then he shrugged with nervous anger and left the room.

Peter tarried long enough to grate at Joyce, in a harsh whisper, “No more food! Stop it now!” Then, ignoring her wide-eyed uncomprehending gaze, he hurried after Ginger, back toward the living room.

Mark had disintegrated, he was nothing and nobody. All his thoughts splintered into shards and disconnected fragments, like those waves out there breaking on the black rocks. He was the junked remains of himself, a disposable artifact used up and thrown away, a shell, drained and purposeless. Years and years ago the key had been inserted, twisted and twisted, winding him tight and ever tighter, setting him to march forward through life, a robot patricide with but one function, one millisecond of true blazing purpose; when he would hold his father’s life between his hands, and end it.

The moment had come, he had activated himself, he had shone like the sun in his flash of life, and now he was burned out, his potential all in the past; he had nothing, he was nothing. He was as incapable of murdering the same victim a second time as if he had not been interrupted. He was a patricide, the decision had been all, the performance merely its outward effect. That Mark continued to breathe, to move through life, to experience time, was a frustrating anomaly. Certainly he could no longer react, not to events nor to other human beings. The makework of existence was finished; nothing touched him now.

“Maa-ark! Maa-ark!”

On the cantilevered deck of the house, silhouetted by the glowing stonewalled living room behind her, Joyce was waving, bobbing up on tiptoe. Mark saw her without curiosity, and continued his plodding walk through the sand.

“Mark! It’s about to begin! The show’s coming on!”

His left had made a full-armed broad down-sweeping gesture of rejection: Go away. Leave me alone. He did not look up again.

Someone swiveled the Eames chair to face the huge television screen. Liz frowned, grabbing the rudimentary chair-arms as it swung, but said nothing. From above and behind her, Peter’s voice said, “Watch the program, Liz. Take an interest.”

But she didn’t take an interest, that was just it. Tripping had been a disaster, a terrible mistake. She’d had great difficulty coming back, and even now was still subject to brief visual phenomena, light flashes, shifts in the color spectrum, quick dissolving and immediate reconstructions of solid objects like that stone wall behind the free-standing television screen. Otherwise her mind no longer floated, but she had returned freighted with the cruel discoveries of the journey; though not discoveries exactly, having existed in her mind all along, kept out of sight because they were both true and unbearable.

That she had gone too far, that’s what it came down to. Not in this trip alone, but always, completely in her life. For the sake of passions of the moment—political, personal, social passions—she had acted in ways that kept her from ever coming back. America had calmed from the excesses of the sixties, was putting its house in order, returning to normal life; but for Liz there was no return, there would never again be a normal life. She had gone too far, back when it had seemed that the sixties would last forever. To this degree she had been right: for her, the sixties were forever. She was imprisoned in that time more securely than the government, if it ever did get its hands on her, could possibly imprison her.

Sometimes she almost envied Frances, six years dead, out of it when it was still fresh. Let federal warrants be out for Frances Steffalo; after six years in Lake Erie water, weighted and silent and sinking into the scum, she would not be found, would not be paraded before the shallow giggling media as Eric had been, as so many had been. “Not me,” she said, not aloud, merely mouthing the words, staring sightless at the TV screen.

Eric had been everything. Eric had taught her what her body was for, what her brain was for, what the world was for. “It isn’t hard to change society,” he used to say, with his easy bright intelligent grin. “Society changes all the time, whether we help it along or not. Capitalism is an aberration, a mistaken turn away from feudalism—it would have been so much easier to go directly to collectivism then, simply remove the landlord class and permit the masses to absorb the land they already occupied. All right, an aberration. But it’s coming to an end, and unless somebody gives the whole rolling mass a shove in a