Worlds That Weren't

“A lover? No. I will rewrite the letter later, perhaps, to make it less strident.” He laughed again. “I thought Elisabeth might understand my ideas, but she is too limited, she has not risen above the patronizing attitudes of that little small town where we grew up-” Anger began to build in his heart, rising to a red, scalding fury. “She rewrote my work. I sent her some of my notebooks to publish, and she changed my words, she added anti-Semitic nonsense to the manuscript. She has fallen under the influence of those who hate the Jews, and she is being courted by one, a professional anti-Semite named Forster, a man who distributes wretched tracts at meetings.” He waved a fist in the air. “She said she was making my thoughts clearer.” He realized his voice had risen to a shout, and he tried to calm himself, suddenly falling into a mumble. “As if she herself has ever had any clear thoughts!” he said. “God help me if she remains my only conduit to the publishers.”

Josie listened to this in silence, eyes glimmering in the light of the lantern. “You aren’t an anti-Semite, then?” she said. “Your Superman isn’t a-what is the word they use, those people? — Aryan?”

Freddie shook his head. “Neither he nor I am as simple as that.”

“I’m Jewish,” she said.

He ran his fingers through his hair. “I know,” he said. “Someone told me.”

Bells began to sing in his head-not the bells of pain, those clanging racking peals of his migraine, but bells of wild joy, a carillon that pealed out in celebration of some pagan triumph.

Josie looked up, and he followed her glance upward to the pistol belt above his head, to his Colt, his Zarathustra, the blue steel that gleamed in the darkness.

“You’ve killed men,” she said.

“Not so many as rumors would have it.”

“But you have killed.”

“Yes.”

“Did they deserve it?”

“It is not the killing that matters,” Freddie said. “It is not the deserving.” A laugh burbled out, the strange rapture rising. “Any fool can kill,” he said, “and any animal-but it takes a Caesar, or a Napoleon, to kill as a human being, as a moment of self-becoming. To rise above that-” He began to stammer in his enthusiasm. “-that merely human act-that foolishness-to overcome-to become-”

“The Superman?” she queried.

“Ha-ha!” He laughed in sudden giddy triumph. “Yes! Exactly!”

She rose from the chair, stepped to the head of the bed in a swirl of skirts. She reached a hand toward the gun, hesitated, then looked down at him.

“Nicht nur fort sollst du dich pflanzen sondern hinauf,” she said.

Her German was fluent, accented slightly by Yiddish. Freddie stared at her in astonishment.

“You read my journals!” he said.

A smile drifted across her face. “I wasn’t very successful-your handwriting is difficult, and I speak German easier than I read it.”

“My God.” Wonder rang in his head. “No one has ever read my journals.”

That is her Jewish aspect, he thought, the people of the Book. Reverence for thought, from the only people in the world who held literacy as a test of manhood.

Josie glanced down at him. “Tell me what that means-that we should propagate not only downward, but upward.”

Weird elation sang through his head. “I meant that we need not be animals when-” He recalled the decencies only at the last second. “-when we marry,” he finished. “We need not bring only more apes into the world. We can create. We can be together not because we are lonely or inadequate, but because we are whole, because we wish to triumph!”

Josie gave a low, languorous laugh, and with an easy motion slid into his lap. Strangely enough he was not surprised. He put his arms around her, wild hope throbbing in his veins.

“Shall we triumph, Freddie?” she asked. Troy burned in her eyes.

“Yes!” he said in sudden delirium. “By God, yes!”

She bent forward, touched her lips to his. A rising, glorious astonishment whirled in Freddie’s body and soul.

“You taste like a narcotic,” she said softly, and-laughing low-kissed him again.

It was an hour or so later that the shots began echoing down Tombstone’s streets, banging out with frantic speed, sounds startling in the surrounding stillness. Freddie sat up. “My God, what is that?” he said.

“Some of your friends, probably,” Josie said. She reached out her hands, drew him down to the mattress again. “Whoever is shooting, they don’t need you there.”

Is that Behan’s motto? Freddie wondered. But at the touch of her hands he felt flame burn in his veins, and he paid no attention to the shooting, not even when more guns began to speak, and the firing went on for some time.