This Perfect Day

"Oh," Chip said, standing by the chair. "I wanted to see how he was. Now that I'm all right, I guess I want to be sure that everyone else is."

"Of course he is," Bob said. "It's an odd thing to do, after so many years."

"I just happened to think of him," Chip said.

He acted normal from the first chime to the last and met with the group twice a week. He kept working at the language—Italiano, it was called—although he suspected that King was right and there was no point in it. It was something to do, though, and seemed more worthwhile than playing with mechanical toys. And once in a while it brought Lilac to him, leaning over to look, with one hand on the leather-topped table he worked at and the other on the back of his chair. He could smell her—it wasn't his imagination; she actually smelled of flowers—and he could look at her dark cheek and neck and the chest of her coveralls pushed taut by two mobile round protrusions. They were breasts. They were definitely breasts.

Chapter 4

One night late in august, while looking for more books in Italiano, he found one in a different language whose title, Vers I'avenir, was similar to the Italiano words verso and avvenire and apparently meant Toward the Future. He opened the book and thumbed its pages, and Wei Li Chun caught his eye, printed at the tops of twenty or thirty of them.

Other names were at the tops of other clusters of pages, Mario Sofik, A. F. Liebman. The book, he realized, was a collection of short pieces by various writers, and two of the pieces were indeed by Wei. The title of one of them, Le pas prochain en avant, he recognized (pas would be passo; avant, avanti) as "The Next Step Forward," in Part One of Wei's Living Wisdom.

The value of what he had found, as he began to perceive it, held him motionless. Here in this small brown book, its cover clinging by threads, were twelve or fifteen pre-U-language pages of which he had an exact translation waiting in his night-table drawer. Thousands of words, of verbs in their bafflingly changing forms; instead of guessing and groping as he had done for his near-useless fragments of Italiano, he could gain a solid footing in this second language in a matter of hours!

He said nothing to the others; slipped the book into his pocket and joined them; filled his pipe as if nothing were out of the ordinary. Le pas-whatever-it-was-avant. might not be "The Next Step Forward" after all. But it was, it had to be.

It was; he saw it as soon as he compared the first few sentences. He sat up in his room all that night, carefully reading and comparing, with one finger at the lines in the pre-U language and another at the lines translated. He worked his way two times through the fourteen-page essay, and then began making alphabetical word lists.

The next night he was tired and slept, but the following night, after a visit from Snowflake, he stayed up and worked again.

He began going to the museum on nights between meetings. There he could smoke while he worked, could look for other Francais books—Francais was the language's name; the hook below the C was a mystery—and could roam the halls by flashlight. On the third floor he found a map from 1951, artfully patched in several places, where Eur was "Europe," with the division called "France" where Francais had been used, and all its strangely and appealingly named cities: "Paris" and "Nantes" and "Lyon" and "Marseille."

Still he said nothing to the others. He wanted to confound King with a language fully mastered, and delight Lilac. At meetings he no longer worked at Italiano. One night Lilac asked him about it, and he said, truthfully, that he had given up trying to unravel it. She turned away, looking disappointed, and he was happy, knowing the surprise he was preparing for her.

Saturday nights were wasted, lying by Mary KK, and meeting nights were wasted too; although now, with Hush dead, Leopard sometimes didn't come, and when he didn't, Chip stayed on at the museum to straighten up and stayed still later to work.

In three weeks he could read Francais rapidly, with only a word here and there that was indecipherable. He found several Francais books. He read one whose title, translated, was The Purple Sickle Murders; and another, The Pygmies of the Equatorial Forest; and another, Father Goriot.

He waited until a night when Leopard wasn't there, and then he told them. King looked as if he had heard bad news. His eyes measured Chip and his face was still and controlled, suddenly older and more gaunt. Lilac looked as if she had been given a longed-for gift. "You've read books in it?" she said. Her eyes were wide and shining and her lips stayed parted. But neither one's reaction could give Chip the pleasure he had looked forward to. He was grave with the weight of what he now knew.

"Three of them," he said to Lilac. "And I'm halfway through a fourth."

"That's marvelous, Chip!" Snowflake said. "What did you keep it a secret for?" And Sparrow said, "I didn't think it was possible."