Going

Seven

In the next few days he managed to get to know some of the others. It was a task he imposed on himself. Throughout his life Staunt had negotiated, sometimes with difficulty, the narrow boundary between reserve and snobbery, trying to keep to himself without seeming to reject the company of others, and he was particularly eager not to withdraw into self-sufficiency at this time of all times. So he sought out his fellow Departing Ones and did what he could to scale the barriers separating them from him.

It was late in life to be making new friends, though. He found it hard to communicate much about himself to them, or to draw from them anything of consequence beyond the bare facts of their lives. As he suspected, they were a dull lot, people who had never achieved anything in particular except longevity. Staunt did not hold that against them: he saw no reason why everyone had to bubble with creativity, and he had deeply loved many whose only gifts had been gifts of friendship. But these people, coming now to the end of their days, were hollowed by time’s erosions, and there was so little left of them that even ordinary human warmth had been worn away. They answered his questions perfunctorily and rarely responded with questions of their own. “A composer? How nice. I used to listen to music sometimes.” He succeeded in discovering that Seymour Church had been living in the House of Leavetaking for eight months at his son’s insistence but did not want to Go; that Ella Freeman had had (or believed she had had) a love affair, more than a century ago, with a man who later became President; that David Golding had been married six times and was inordinately proud of it; that each of these Departing Ones clung to some such trifling biographical datum that gave him a morsel of individual identity. But Staunt was unable to penetrate beyond that one identifying datum; either nothing else was in them, or they could not or would not reveal themselves to him. A dull lot, but Staunt was no longer in a position to choose his companions for their merits.

During his first week in Arizona most of the members of his family came to see him, beginning with Paul and young Henry, Crystal’s son. They stayed with him for two days. David, Crystal’s other son, arrived a little later, along with his wife; their children, and one of their grandchildren; then Paul’s two daughters showed up, and an assortment of youngsters. Everyone, even the young ones, wore sickly-sweet expressions of bliss. They were determined to look upon Staunt’s Going as a beautiful event. In their conversations with him they never spoke of Going at all, only of family gossip, music, springtime, flowers, reminiscences. Staunt played their game. He had no more wish for emotional turmoil than they did; he wanted to back amiably out of their lives, smiling and bowing. He was careful, therefore, not to imply in anything he said that he was shortly going to end his life. He pretended that he had merely come to this place in the desert for a brief vacation.

The only one who did not visit him, aside from a few great-grandchildren, was his daughter Crystal. When he tried to phone her, he got no reply. His callers avoided any mention of her. Was she ill, Staunt wondered? Dead, even? “What are you trying to hide from me?” he asked his son finally. “Where’s Crystal?”

“Crystal’s fine,” Paul said.

“That’s not what I asked. Why hasn’t she come here?”

“Actually she hasn’t been entirely well.”

“As I suspected. She’s seriously ill, and you think the shock of hearing about it will harm me.”

Paul shook his head. “It isn’t like that at all.”

“What’s wrong with her?” Visions of cancer, heart surgery, brain tumors. “Has she had some kind of transplant? Is she in a hospital?”

“It isn’t a physical problem. Crystal’s simply suffering from fatigue. She’s gone to Luna Dome for a rest.”

“I spoke to her last month,” Staunt said. “She looked all right then. I want the truth, Paul.”

“The truth.”

“The truth, yes.”

Paul’s eyes closed wearily for a moment, and in that moment Staunt saw his son for what he was, an old man, though not so old a man as he. After a pause Paul said in a flat, toneless voice, “The trouble is that Crystal hasn’t accepted your Going very well. I called her about it, right after you told me, and she became hysterical. She thinks you’re being hoodwinked, that your Guide is part of a conspiracy to do away with you, that your decision is at least ten or fifteen years premature. And she can’t speak calmly about it, so we felt it was best to get her away where she wasn’t likely to speak to you, to keep her from disturbing you. There. That’s the story. I wasn’t going to tell you.”

“Silly of you to hide it.”

“We didn’t want to spoil your Going with a lot of carrying on.”

“My Going won’t spoil that easily. I’d like to talk to her, Paul. She may benefit from whatever help I can give her. If I can make her see Going for what it really is—if I can convince her that her outlook is unhealthy—Paul, set up a call to Luna Dome for me, will you? The Fulfillment people will pay. Crystal needs me. I have to make her understand.”

“If you insist,” Paul said.

Somehow, though, technical problems prevented the placing of the call that day, and the next, and the one after that. And then Paul left the House of Leavetaking. When Staunt phoned him at home to find out where on the moon Crystal actually was, he became evasive and said that she had recently transferred from one sanatorium to another. It would be a few more days, Paul said, before the call could be placed. Seeing his son’s agitation, Staunt ceased pressing the issue. They did not want him to talk to Crystal. Crystal’s hysterics would ruin his Going, they felt. They would not give him the chance to soothe her. So be it. He could not fight them. This must be a difficult time for the whole family; if they wished to think that Crystal would upset him so terribly, he would let the matter drop, for a while. Perhaps he could speak to her later. There would be time before his Going. Perhaps. Perhaps.