Sun City

I traveled through America, through Florida, and came one night to a city that was completely silent. The next morning it was just as quiet and empty. The open porches rested in their greenery with long rows of rocking chairs, all turned to the street. The stillness was almost awful. And then I understood the city was one of the sun cities, the cities of the elderly where sun is guaranteed year-round. Everything is set up for rest and senescence, inexorable and ideal.

I have called the city St. Petersburg but it could just as well have another name. And calm it is not; it’s just as cool and adventurous a place as every place else on Earth. I have tried to write a book about becoming old. And described the love between two very young and beautiful people who live in the city of the elderly.

In America, and very intensely in Florida, a new belief that Jesus is returning, now, in the end times, is widespread, and it is the youth that are awaiting His return. I have made Bounty Joe one of those awaiting this. He works security on the movie-ship, the mutiny-ship Bounty, which sits anchored out in St. Petersburg’s harbor.

The whole city, as I experienced it, is a sort of last beach for departure and arrival, an open possibility headed anywhere. The sun city is a lovable, horrible, and very alive city.

–Tove Jansson
Translated from the Swedish by Maya Weeks

*

Linda had two hours to herself in the middle of the day, and she usually spent them in her room. It was a small, attractive room, entirely whitewashed and protected from the heat by the dense greenery in the back yard. Joe had fixed the alter above the bed and propped up the shelf so it would sit straight. He had run an electric cord to the lamp above God’s Mother, who stood in the alter with her plastic flowers and the sugar skulls from Guadalajara. Joe respected the Madonna, although he was more interested in Jesus. They seldom talked about either one, and why should people talk about obvious things like the sun and the moon? The Madonna smiled constantly. Below here was Miss Frey’s bell and the keys to the house. Linda took off all her clothes and lay down naked on the bed in perfect peace, with one hand under her chin. It was a good bed with durable coil springs. Pretty pictures began to float by, each one prettier than the one before. Mama first, and then Joe. Mama was big and calm and worked hard, and she didn’t have to worry about her daughter, who was doing fine. She trudged through Guadalajara in her black dress with her basket on her head, into the shade of the market and back out into the sun again, taking care of her family. Joe was well off, with a steady job and a good salary. When Linda had thought about both of them, she let Silver Springs float by. She had never seen Silver Springs. There was a jungle river with water clear as crystal and monkeys frolicking on the banks. For a dollar you could ride on a river boat with a glass bottom and look at the fish swimming steadily by across the white sand. The jungle arched over the river from both sides, a soft green roof that continued far into America for hundreds of protected miles. Everything was protected by the government and there were neither snakes nor scorpions. Dear Madonna, Linda whispered, let me make love to Joe on the banks of the jungle river. And then by your grace we will wade out into the water and swim slowly away together, farther and farther away. She reached up and switched on the Madonna’s lamp, not for the light but to pay respect. Then she folded her hands on her lovely stomach and fell asleep.

Bounty Joe came to her. He stood in the window open to the yard and called into her room. “Hi! They’ve forgotten me. They didn’t mean it.”

Linda lay still and looked at him. She said he had to be patient. It took a long time to find a house that didn’t cost anything, and they wouldn’t let people live in all the houses that were going to be torn down. The police in Miami were bad. He came in and sat down on the bed, facing the other way. “I can’t wait any more, and I don’t know where they are. They could be anyplace, but they’ll never come here, no one ever comes here. Maybe they’ve found some place, a camp, a cave, a shack, how do I know? They found it a long time ago and forgot to write. And you know,” he continued sternly, “you know as soon as I hear from them I’m leaving. There isn’t much time. I’m leaving whether you come along or not!”

“I know,” Linda said.

“And you’re staying here.”

“I have a good job,” she said. “And they have given me papers right up to Christmas.”

“Christmas!” Joe said. “That’s ridiculous. He’s going to come any day and you talk about Christmas and papers! It makes me mad to hear you talk like that when everything’s about to happen. You’ve got the chance to be part of it, and you just let it go without blinking an eye. You could be there to welcome Him!”

“And if He does come,” Linda said, “If He does come back, how do you know He won’t come here in­ stead? It could be St. Petersburg as well as Miami, the world is so big.”

Joe stood up and started pacing back and forth in the room. He explained that the important thing was to be together, to be a group, and to have something cer­ tain to believe in. “There’s no time to lose,” he said. “He might come back in a week. They’ve figured out it’s going to happen any time, so right now is the time to know what it’s all about and to wait together. They play music the whole time. They play and talk to each other and dance while they wait. You can’t wait all alone.”

“Yes,” Linda said, “I can see it’s important. But you must watch out for the police in Miami. They come in black cars and drive along the beach and pick up every­ one who has no place to live.”

“You don’t understand,” he said. “There are thou­ sands of them waiting on the beaches. They’re like a family. They share everything.” He tore open his jacket and showed her his Jesus sign on the inside, in red and purple and orange. JESUS LOVES YOU.

“Good,” she said. “But you should have it on the outside of your jacket.”

“I will! I’ll have it all over! On my shirt and my trunks and all over if only they write to me! Didn’t you see the cross on my bike? Don’t you understand what’s happening?”

It was hard to understand why Jesus made Joe so crazy. Maybe Jesus really was going to come back. And of course in that case he would have to be welcomed properly. He was temperamental and spoiled and never let you know ahead of time. The Madonna made no uncertain promises. She was simply there, always, eter­ nally. An endless stream of miracles flowed from her bosom. “Dear Joe,” Linda said, “don’t be mad at me. I hope so much that He will come. You must be patient. They will write when they find out where He will land.”

He looked at her face, which was always serene, and all at once her submissive certainty seemed awful. “Why do you smile all the time?” he said.

“Because I am looking at you,” she said. “Do you think we’ll have time to visit Silver Springs before He comes?”

Thompson had a great weakness for Linda. She never told about the box under his bed, the cardboard box where he hid books, cognac, garlic sausage, and a can for cigarette butts. It was against the rules to smoke in the rooms. Thompson’s room was impregnated with the stink of tobacco, mingled with garlic and, to some extent, unwashed clothes. Linda said nothing. She seemed to consider it natural that the rug was rolled up against the wall. She understood that the room gradually had to take on a character suited to the way he lived. She cleaned it very gently and with great consideration and never invaded his private life. This space, this extremely homey and evil-smelling space that represented Thomp­ son’s last barricade against the world, was the cheapest room at the Berkeley Arms, a narrow rectangle partially hidden beneath the stairs and furnished with odds and ends. He had hung his bedspread across the middle of the rectangle from one wall to the other and lived pri­ marily in the window end. ·when he came in and closed the door behind him, the room was in darkness. The darkness divided the life that was forced upon him from the life that was conscious and private. In complete calm he waited to pass through the darkness toward forget­ fulness and pleasure. Pictures and faces vanished and the voices were finally silenced. He stood still and waited. Eventually he could see the daylight outlining the bedspread, very faintly, and then he stepped forward and lifted the darkness to one side and entered his own essential space of bed, lamp, and chair. No one knew that Mr. Thompson could be happy, a fact that he took great pains to conceal. Women frightened him, these women who were everywhere and who died much too old. Over the years there was little they hadn’t said to him, the way women do. They had shaped his silence. Today as he entered his innermost room, he put Pea­ body’s money in the jar for private use. He sat down in the chair facing the window and looked into the same translucent greenery that shaded Linda’s sleep. Both of them lived in a primeval forest, screened off from the world. He rolled the first cigarette of the day. The to­ bacco was coarse and unwieldy and a great deal slid off the paper. He pushed it into a little pile with his shoe to attend to later on, licked the cigarette shut, and lit it. Smoking gave Mr. Thompson a solitary satisfaction, the vindictive pleasure of things that are never shared. None of those veranda ladies, those old wives, those maidens and crones, those indescribable females, knew that he smoked. He deprived them of his secret joy, he punished them by smoking only in solitude.

Because Mr. Thompson was a woman hater, he thought about women a lot. His friend from San Fran­ cisco, Jeremiah Spennert, had never talked about women voluntarily, but if someone mentioned them he shook his head and smiled sadly, probably to indicate that they didn’t know what they were doing and so couldn’t be held responsible. The subject Thompson had chosen for today’s meditation was: epithets worthy of woman. For Jeremiah Spennert’s sake, he wanted to establish a designation that would express both dignity and charm. He quietly bypassed those titles of honor that by dint of taboo or overloaded symbolism cannot be used in a factual assessment, such as mother, queen, madonna, or even helpmate, which was a euphemistic circumlocution for wife in literary or generally false contexts. He dismissed those poetic arabesques that led the mind astray and had no counterparts in the real world, such as nymph, muse, dryad, etc., hesitated for a moment at the beautiful word mistress, and then sent her the same way. Working from the bottom up he peeled off everything that smacked of shabbiness or har­ lotry, and somewhere in the middle he came across sis­ ters, aunts, mothers-in-law and the like, but eliminated them as being almost comic in an analysis of the present kind. More and more names with feminine significance forced themselves upon him. There were too many, way too many. Thompson decided hastily that only one “lady” and one “virgin” could be retained as the possible bearers of sweet dignity-at least for the moment, as a working hypothesis. He opened the window to get some air and think. After a while he discarded both he lady and the virgin. The only true woman was Linda. Linda had not been corrupted by her sex. She had miraculously and inexplicably escaped.

A faint smell of flowers drifted into Thompson’s room. The sun had moved toward the veranda but still lingered in the foliage above the back yard. It shone through the leaves and made pretty patterns of light and shade, motionless in the growing heat. The morning had been interesting. Every time he talked about death, at least one of the women would behave irrationally. Thompson recalled with pleasure the two ladies who had taken a beer with him at Palmer’s, the large quiet one and the little uncertain one, the one with no chin, Peabody. He wished Rubinstein had been there. He had fixed her name in his mind, deeply and inexorably. It would have done Rubinstein good to sit in his silence, frozen out, whispering about trivial things, her with her disdainful voice that was impossible to understand-a satisfied voice, a stupid woman’s self-satisfied voice.

It was quiet in the back yard. Johanson’s garage stuck out between the bushes and the tool shed, but Johanson himself was nowhere to be seen. He’s afraid of me, Thompson thought. Grandpa Johanson is very scared of me! The second cigarette of the day was fin­ ished, and he hid the butt in the can under the bed. It was execution time. The book was called New Galaxies. There was a typical Martian landscape on the dust jacket under the lending libraris plastic cover. Thomp­ son opened to where he had stopped and continued his microscopic notations in the margin. He used a fine ballpoint pen, and his handwriting was so excessively tiny that it looked as if an insect had dipped its legs in ink and scurried hastily across the paper. “Wrong!” Thompson wrote. “On page 60 there is mention of a lack of oxygen. Now we have a love scene (which is idiotic anyway) where the people have no trouble breathing. ‘Quivering heat’ is used three times on the last four pages.” He read on and underlined “the dark­ ening heavens.” “This author,” Thompson noted in the margin, “has a morbid fascination with ‘darkening,’ ‘shimmering’ (to some extent ‘glowing’), and ‘dusk.’ All of his male characters sneer, have steady eyes, and express themselves either ‘with amusement,’ ‘drily,’ or ‘with suppressed rage.’ His women primarily pant and whisper, when they’re not screaming.”

Mr. Thompson’s commentaries had found their most fertile soil in science fiction. When he was younger, about fifty, he had assaulted poetry but found that form of expression indefensible and not really in need of commentary. After eight pages of New Galaxies, Thompson set aside his morning game and took out a book given him by his friend Jeremiah Spennert. Some­ times when his spirits were low he would read a little in this voluminous work by G. W. F. Hegel, merely in tribute and in memory of his friend from San Francisco.