Flying in the Heart of the Lafayette Escadrille
James Van Pelt








James Van Pelt’s fourth story collection Flying in the Heart of the Lafayette Escadrille offers a carnival of science fiction, fantasy and horror tales. Hang on as you fly a WWI fighter plane hanging in a singles’ bar, ride a dragon from a troubled-man’s past, run genetically engineered world record marathons, see Tokyo Rose and the ghost of a romance past, read books before they turn to stone, run with wolves who will not let you go, conduct alien abductions, and swim in a lake of childhood regrets. Van Pelt’s wide-ranging imagination promises a surprise at every turn, taking you into the very heart of your dreams and fears.






James Van Pelt

FLYING IN THE HEART OF THE LAFAYETTE ESCADRILLE







To Ed Low, Bonnie Slack, Mrs. Smith, and every hardworking English teacher who loves literature, writing, and students equally.






INTRODUCTION

by Brenda Cooper


Some of us in the Northwest are lucky. Once every year, James Van Pelt comes to the Rainforest Writer’s Village, and we get to hear him teach. He is an educator by trade, and good at it. If we’re extra lucky, we join him on a walk through the amazing Cascade rainforest, with its cedar overstory and fern and water and moss understory. Sometimes we sit huddled together by a blazing hot fireplace insert in a bar that the entire group of us takes over for the cold, rainy days, and we write fiction while he writes fiction.

This is the context in which I first met James. He is one of our best writers. He mostly does short fiction, so what you are holding in your hand is some of the best current science fiction and fantasy available. Really. You don’t have to believe me. Just go visit his webpage and peruse his bibliography and notice how many of his short stories ended up in Year’s Best anthologies of one kind or another, or gained honorable mentions in them.

The thing I love the most about Jim’s writing is that it’s smart. The stories are true to their speculative roots, redolent with wonder, but they’ve also been touched by the literary brush. They contain well-crafted sentences and well-placed commas, solid workable structure, and confident prose.

The thing I love the next-most about Jim’s writing is that it’s varied. In this collection you’ll find a wide array of characters in different situations, times, and settings and with different problems. After reading at least forty or fifty of his stories, I’m pretty confident that Jim can pull off anything. I happen to know he has now sold over a hundred stories, and I’m sure they are very different one from another. This particular collection shows more of Jim’s range than any of his others; I was regularly surprised by the stories as I read through them.

When Jim asked me to write this introduction, I said “yes” in spite of the fact that there was no way I had time to read it all. But it felt like an honor to be asked. I had read all of his last collection, The Radio Magician and Other Stories, and provided a blurb for it. So I could do this. I would simply read a few of these stories, comment on those, and it would all be well.

I should have known better.

Despite my lack of time, I read the whole damned thing. Jim’s just that good a writer. Here are a few of my favorites:

The title story, “Flying in the Heart of the Lafayette Escadrille,” is just magic. From the opening paragraph, I’m there with Jim’s character.

“Just Before Recess” is short and magical and strange. Good strange. I’m going to give you the opening line, just so you don’t miss this little gem. “Parker kept a sun in his desk.” Wow. Don’t you just have to go read that?

“Night Sweats” is the most subtle ghost story I have ever read.

My favorite story in the whole collection is “Howl Above the Din.” It’s incredibly bitter-sweet and evocative, and the tiniest bit sexy.

Closely in second place, this collection also includes the quirky commentary on the human heart called “Plant Life.”

I shall stop now. I could say something nice about every story in this book. But I think I should get out of the way so that you can start reading. Enjoy!




FLYING IN THE HEART OF THE LAFAYETTE ESCADRILLE


At 14,000 feet the November air rushes from the prop and buffets my head. Even with goggles, a thick, fur-lined leather cap and a layer of protective grease on my face, I am freezing. My cheeks tingle, my hands ache, and my knees crack with stiffness. My elbows clamp my ribs to hold in a little warmth as I admire the rising sun’s broad, lovely light shafts through the clouds and the long shadows across the Verdun sector’s snow-covered fields. I don’t mind the cold. Everything is white or purple except my brown and tan pursuit ship and my black twin Vickers machine guns.

The 110 horse power Le Rhone engine’s roar deafens me but is so steady that I have to concentrate to hear it. I fly, then, in a kind of silence. The clean air, the sun-bathed countryside, the two toned clouds cut into irregular halves of light and dark, and the Nieuport 17, an old and reliable partner now of three months, are my only company. I fly solo. Dawn patrol. I hunt an enemy, a specific ship, a blue and silver Fokker D-2 with a red cowling.

The plane responds to my thoughts. I think left and the horizon tilts; I scan the air below. At this height I am unlikely to be surprised from above. The Boche send flights from Colmar and Habsheim, but they fly lower, relying on the cover of archie from the ground to protect them, and they seldom cross the lines.

A stream glints like a mirrored ribbon and cuts a diagonal through the trenches. An infantryman could put a note in a bottle and float it to the other line. Maybe he could write about his family back home, or invite whoever reads it to share a drink with him, if whoever picks it up could read it that is, if he could understand the language.

I think right and the world rotates for me. Three two-seaters several thousand feet lower than I fly south, but they are British observers, their wings’ bull’s-eye insignias obvious. I don’t believe they know I pass above them. They must be young. At twenty-nine, I am not. I lied about my age to the French, although they might have let me fly anyway—they want the American volunteers to fight for them. They even brought us together into one unit and called us the Americaine Escadrille, but the Heinies complained—America is neutral—and now we are the Lafayette Escadrille. They’ve told us to say, viv le France. God bless America, and to hell with the Hun!




“I love this place, Eddie. Don’t you? You got to love this place,” Brian, the bar-ace, yelled over the rock-and-roll din of the Lafayette Escadrille Bar and Grill. “Look at that,” he said as a waitress walked by in a French maid’s uniform, beer pitcher and three mugs in one hand, black fish-net stockings emphasizing the curve of her calves and the aerobicized tone of her thighs. “Makes me want to roll around in the dirt.”

“Yeah, she’s okay,” I said. I balanced the stool on two legs and rested my back on the sandbag wall. The blue runway lights of Stapleton International Airport backlit the filled dance floor. A 737, its jets cranked for take-off, rushed by and rattled the heavy, insulated glass. Even through the music, the engines pushed a subsonic vibration into the bar. Glasses and change buzzed for a second on dark oak table tops.

The Lafayette Escadrille opened a year ago when a group of Denver stock-brokers pooled their money and invested in a “high concept” singles joint; they turned a barn on the edge of the north-south runway into a World War I French chalet. In front of the building, pointing skyward at a ridiculously phallic angle, are a pair of anti-aircraft guns; on the wall inside the door hang black and white photos: a fuzzy shot of Kaiser Wilhelm II visiting an airdrome; a crowd of officers standing around the wreckage of Max Immelmann’s plane; George Guynemer, France’s leading ace, facing the camera with his hands behind his back; Baron Manfred von Richthofen standing for inspection with the pilots of Jagdgeschwader No. 2. I’ve stood in the foyer and studied these pictures when the noise and smoke and disgust have driven me out of the bar. I’ve looked at their gray and grainy faces for some clue as to what they felt when they climbed in their planes. How could they go up every day? No parachutes. No early warning radar. No way to talk to each other.

Inside, the stockbrokers had mounted on the walls propellers, machine guns, flight jackets, leather boots, more pictures and other paraphenalia. The real coup though, held by cables above the dance floor, the most distinctive decoration, is a completely restored Nieuport 17. Its fifteen coats of hand-buffed varnish reflect the runway lights so the plane looks like it’s floating in blue air. When I drink too much I want to climb up to her, to start her engine and fly through the windows. Two months ago—I don’t remember this, but they say it’s true—they pulled me off the access ladder leading to the catwalk above the plane. The only way to get to the ladder is to jump on the bar. I don’t believe them when they say I did that. I stare at the plane for long periods some time.

Brian’s right, it’s a great bar. I go every week, sometimes with him, sometimes by myself. Lots of stewardesses looking for fun on a layover and nurses from Fitzsimmons. Good bands.

A short brunette wearing a fur coat brushed the edge of our table as she walked by.

“Scuse me!” Brian yelled. I’ve seen this approach before. He says the key to scoring is getting their attention, that it doesn’t matter what you say as long as they look at you. He said to me once, “Get them into a rhythm, a call and response thing, and you’re half way home.” She turned her head, looked at him and slowed down. Brian’s One-Stop-Sun-Shop tan and hair is so blond, its white gets most of them.

“Nice jacket. Does that have buttons or a zipper?” He smiled. His teeth are a little crooked and one of the top front ones is turning black from a bad root canal, but he talks so fast and smiles so often that women never seem to mind.

She pulled the edges of the coat closed and hurried towards the bar as if she’d just seen someone she knew.

“Frigid or a lesbo. If they won’t talk, they’re one or the other.” He rested his hand on his beer. The band kicked into a heavily drummed tune that sounded good to dance to.

He pushed his elbows off the table and scanned the room. The late flights were all in and unaccompanied women sipping from wine coolers or spritzers sat together in small groups around the tables. So few men were in the place that women were dancing with each other. They looked like they were having a good time. The Lafayette is an undiscovered resource in Denver. Most guys head for After the Gold Rush or Confetti’s where the ratio is three to one the wrong way.

“I’m going to the aviator,” he said. “Prime time.”

Lafayette’s bathrooms are labled “aviator” and “aviatrix.” When Brian’s on the hunt he will leave once an hour, lock himself in a stall, take a wad of tobacco laced with coke, and come out ready to fly. “Just a pinch between my cheek and gum is the real thing,” he’d say. I’d tried it once, but I got sick. No buzz.

Another bar-ace I know named Quinn, when I asked him what he did to make connections at singles joints, told me, “I plant seeds. I strike up a conversation; maybe dance, buy them a drink. I always make sure they know my name and I know theirs. Two or three weeks later I see them again. We’re friends. They know who I am; I remember them. But I never go home with anyone unless it’s her idea. I’ve learned that it doesn’t do me any good to suggest it. I plant seeds and I wait for the harvest.”

I’m no bar-ace with silhouettes of kills recorded on the headboard. I’m an observer. I want to touch, but not like Brian and Quinn. I mean I like sex just like the next guy, but it doesn’t seem like really being with someone. When I’m through with sex and we’re lying there I secretly grip the pillow, make a fist and squeeze and squeeze and squeeze, because it never goes far enough.

A portrait of Raoul Lufbery, the leading ace of the Lafayette Escadrille hangs in the foyer with the other World War I pictures. He’s facing the camera, one hand in his pocket, the other holding a cigarette between his thumb and index finger. The caption underneath is a quote, “There are only two kinds of combat pilots: those who shoot and those who get shot.” I guess there is something to that.




I’ve been shot down twice. The first time was only a few miles from the Luxeuil-les-Bains airdrome. An all white Halberstadt appeared out of the sun and fired one burst that destroyed my engine and blew oil into my face, blinding me. The wind whined in the wires as I side-slipped hard to the left and started a flat spin to convince him I was dead. German pilots will sometimes continue firing into a crippled plane so that they can report a clean kill. A spinning plane is impossible to get a good shot at. I tore my goggles off when I was convinced that he was not following and landed in a corn field where a French farmer and his wife fed me wine, cheese and coarse bread until the ambulance from Luxeuil came and picked me up.

I bank my plane east now and head deeper into Boche air. Nearly an hour has passed and I will have to turn back soon. The sun glares directly in front of me through the prop’s thin shadow. Subtle currents bump my craft. My wing tips seem to move of their own accord as I balance in the air. I make tiny adjustments with the rudder pedals and the stick. A Nieuport is nothing like the broad-winged Jennies they trained us on. This is an unforgiving machine. A mistake, a moment’s inattention, and the plane is out of control.

I lean the mixture and retard the spark to extend my flying time. The engine begins to miss and I nudge the levers until it runs smoothly again.

The second time was over Cachy Wood near the Somme front. We were returning to Bar-le-Duc airdrome with a squadron of the new British Handley-Page bombers from a mission to destroy a supply dump deep in German territory when I became separated from the others in a cloud. Clouds are always dangerous when planes fly in formations because the visibility drops to zero, so commonly pilots increase the distance between themselves as they enter mist. When the other planes vanished, and I was alone, the solitude, the soft edge of my wingtips and the drops of water streaming off the wires comforted me.

Finally I popped out of the gray darkness and I searched the sky for my squadron. They were gone, but thirty yards to my right and at my altitude flew a blue and silver Fokker D-2 with a red cowling. The black crosses on the fuselage confirmed that I was facing the enemy. We stared at each other across the distance. His goggles reflected pure glisters of sun as we flew side by side like migrating birds. After we had flown together for a moment, he did an odd thing that has burdened me since, a thing I have told no one, not even the other pilots when we drink and laugh and sing each night to forget the days sorties: he waved.

I wasn’t stunned then, only later as I thought about the image of him facing me, hand extended, palm outward, waving. What I did was I dove right, then pulled the stick up hard hoping to get a shot at his underbelly before he moved, but when I got into position, he was gone. Bullets splintered my left wing V-spar. I snapped a hard barrel roll into a vertical loop, but I didn’t shake him, and another shower of lead found my plane, turning the aileron canvas into fragments of flapping cloth.

Turn after turn he hung to my tail, and though I tried every move I knew, he continued to successfully place shots into my ship. Never have I seen flying of this caliber. We fell 10,000 feet during the maneuvering, and then there was no place to dive to. I hugged the ground hoping that the French troops would shoot at him and not at me. His finishing blast should have caught me the instant I quit dodging, but I flew for thirty seconds and no more tracers streaked by my head; I looked behind. He had pulled his plane to the side and out of position to fire, but he was less than twenty yards away. He pointed to his deadly Spandau guns, shrugged his shoulders and turned his ship to the east. He must have run out of ammunition or suffered a jam in the mechanism. I crashed in Cachy Wood and walked away from the wreckage uninjured.

I never had a chance to fire my guns. I am a clumsy flyer, a technician. My commander says, “You must be a flyer in the heart.” I have never shot down an enemy plane.

I am now deep behind the lines and my neck hurts from craning it left and right looking for the blue and silver Fokker D-2. Captain Thenault would not approve this mission, this search for a single ship, and I could not explain it to him had I asked.

I rub frost off my chronometer. I must turn back soon. I have lost altitude to find warmer air. Now, at 8,000 feet, I see the country below has not been touched by the war. The fields are not pockmarked with craters. There are no black trench lines. A thread of smoke comes from a farmhouse chimney.

Why did he wave to me?




Brian came back from the bathroom wired and began a search and destroy circuit of the bar. He approached two women sitting at a table, borrowed a cigarette, talked to them for a few minutes, went to the next table, asked for a light and talked some more. He danced with one of them, moved to another table and started the cycle over again by borrowing a second cigarette. He calls them “pick-up sticks.” It took him forty minutes to hit on all the tables. I finished a pitcher by myself.

A woman sat alone two tables over, her elbows on the table, holding an empty wine glass by its rim. I thought about sitting next to her and talking. She saw me looking; I turned away.

Brian sat down heavily, his chest sweaty, dark stains down the sides of his shirt.

“You’ve got to dance, Eddie. There’s witch wool all over the place, but it’s not going to flop down in front of you.”

“I don’t see anybody I like.”

“So you’re going to drink and feel sorry for yourself. I don’t want to pull you off the ladder again.”

“If I see somebody, I’ll ask. I don’t know what I want just yet.”

His fingers drummed the table. “What do you want?”

He had me there. What did I want? I’d been thinking about it all night. I’d been thinking about it while I studied that Nieuport 17 suspended over the dancers. I’d been thinking about it while men and women moved around the room in separate little flight paths, never really touching each other. I’d been thinking about it while my hands cupped around the beer mug, while my butt flattened against the wooden stool, and while my feet went to sleep in my fashionable cowboy boots that were too tight.

“How close have you ever been to somebody?” I asked.

“Skin close.”

“Is that all?”

“You mean, have I been in love? Sure. I’ve been in love lots of times. I’m in love every night. Do you mean close like in let’s get married close? Yeah, I even did that once. I know all about close. How close do you want?” He dabbed a beer-soaked napkin on his chest.

“Closer than all that. I want to be in a woman.” There, I had said it.

He laughed. “That’s the best way.”

“No! That’s not what I mean. It’s not sexual. Like, when I kiss a woman, I just kiss her outside. I’m not kissing her.” I paused. I didn’t know if I could tell him this. How would he take it? “I want our lips to touch and…”

“What?”

Maybe if I rushed it out it wouldn’t sound so crazy. “I want our lips to meld together. I want to push our faces into each other, have our skin melt and flow and mix so that we’re one head, and I want to feel each molecule swapping electrons inside so there’s no telling who is who.

“I want to fill her up, to be smoke and seep inside her skin so that my smoke legs step into her legs, and my smoke belly presses against the inside of her belly, and my smoke arms slide all the way down the inside of her arms until my fingers fill her fingers like a glove.” Brian moved his stool back a few inches from the table.

“And at the same time I want her to be filling me up. I want her to pry off the top of my head and pour herself inside of me, blood and guts and living liquid bone so I can feel her sloshing around behind my eyes, pushing herself into my tongue, running down the inside of my throat. I want to feel her pooling in my feet, creeping up the insides of my legs, spilling over into my genitals like some smooth, heavy, golden lotion.

“But we can’t ever do that. Every time I reach out to touch her, she flies away or she attacks. And it’s not just her, it’s anybody. It’s you and me. All people. We got this war mentality about each other. I see it in terms of her, but it applies all the way around. I’m flying solo, man, and no one can get in my plane. I can’t get in theirs. I touch only the surface.” Brian sat silent. “You asked,” I said.

Finally, he said, “What’s with all the flying shit?”




I must turn back now. I bank my French machine to the west. Already I have cut my reserve too close and will have to chance the archie as I cross the lines. The angry black and yellow puffs of explosive will seek out my fragile wood and canvas craft.

To amuse myself and to take my mind off missing the blue and silver Boche, I sing a song that I heard in the billet last night:
		The young aviator went Hun hunting,



		And now ’neath the wreckage he lay—he lay,



		To the mechanics there standing around him,



		These last dying words he did say—did say.







		Take the cylinders out of my kidneys,



		The connecting rod out of my brain—my brain.



		From the small of my back take the crankshaft,



		And assemble the engine again—again.








A hint of movement below stops my voice. Sometimes I see motion when there is nothing, but this is another plane, black Iron Crosses readily visible on the top wing, flying a thousand feet below and in my direction. I drop the nose and start a shallow descent into the blind spot above and behind the German.

Heat rushes to my face. The tail and wings are blue, the fusalage silver, and the cowling red. The head of the consummate pilot who shot me down over Cachy Wood stays still. Perhaps this distance from the lines he feels safe.

The firing sights of my guns center on his neck. The distance closes from a hundred yards to fifty and his wings stretch farther and farther. At twenty-five yards I place my hand on the lever that will send a fusilade of bright tracers and lead into his cockpit. From this range I will surely pierce his petrol tanks and send him flaming to the ground. I can see where the bullets will strike, imagine his surprise and panic in the second before the heavy slugs pound out his heart and lungs, and invision the initial hint of fire as the left wing tips up and the plane begins its final spiral into an unmarked, snow-covered German field. He will be my first kill.

A sudden turbulence hits our planes, and I have to fight to keep the sights steady. He makes the same corrections, but his handling of the Fokker is so sure, so graceful. The fighter snaps to his attentions. He waggles his wings. I see no reason for him to do this. He doesn’t turn or change altitude. He waggles them again, like a big dog shaking water from his ears, and I understand that he is playing. His plane sweeps broadly to the left and then broadly to the right; I match the movements. Still, he does not look behind. I believe he thinks he’s alone and he is reveling in his ability to fly. I take my hand from the lever.

I should peel off, dive away so he will never know that I have seen him, so that we will not have to fight in the pure November air above the virgin fields, so that neither of us will have to die.

Instead I pull my plane next to his. He looks at me from fifty feet away as we fly once again side by side. He must be startled by my sudden appearance. He must know that I could have shot him down. I raise my hand; I wave. The wind catches my arm and makes it hard to keep above the windscreen. It seems a long time before he waves back. We continue on our course, but we must separate soon. No one would understand our private armistice. He flies well in his beautiful blue and silver Fokker D-2 with the red cowling. I try to learn from him how to be so in place in the air. I wish the war were over soon.




Brian started to help me with the next pitcher, but he spotted the girl I’d seen earlier. The music overpowered any chance that she would hear even the loudest “Scuse me!” that he could holler, so he wadded up wet napkins and threw them at her until she looked at him. As soon as he caught her eyes he pulled his shirt open and started pointing at his chest while mouthing the words, “You and me, baby. It can happen.” This was a new low in pick-up technique for him, but I wasn’t surprised when she got up, walked over and asked him to dance. I could tell by the way they were talking as they moved to the floor that he would have company going home again.

All the tables were empty. Everybody was dancing, a fast song. I couldn’t tell who was dancing with who. That close together, and from my angle above the floor, they looked like a solid mass, bouncing and waving to the music.

I finished the pitcher by myself while noticing some things: the surface of the bar is slick, and it’s a pretty good jump to that access ladder. A guy would have to have secure traction if he was thinking about climbing the ladder, walking across the catwalk and lowering himself into the cockpit of the Nieuport 17.

I reached under the table and started the difficult process of pulling off my boots.




FATHER’S DRAGON


“Daddy, Daddy, Daddy, I shot a dragon in the garden with the video camera!”

Thomas winced at the word “dragon,” and then, when he shifted his shoulders to get a better angle with the wrench, he clunked his cheekbone against the kitchen sink’s U-joint. He thought, not the dragon again. The cabinet edge dug into his back while the cold, rough underside of the sink pinched his elbow against a copper tube. He couldn’t see his seven-year-old. “The camera’s not a toy, Dolby.” Trapped by the plumbing, Thomas’ voice sounded stupidly hollow to him.

“Mom said I could use it.”

“Tell Mom I said it’s not a toy.”

“I’m filming your feet, Daddy.”

Thomas tried to pull himself out of the cabinet, but when he turned, his elbow forced the copper tube to bend, starting a fine mist from where it joined the faucet deep in the dark gap behind the sink. “Oh, damn.”

“Louder, Daddy. I don’t think I got that.”

Holding his temper, Thomas said, “Hand me the pliers, son.” With his free hand, Thomas bent the tube back, but the mist kept falling. Since he was lying flat, looking up into the workings of the sink, the water sprayed straight into his eyes. He blinked rapidly, as if clearing tears, then leaned his head to the side. His ear filled and the wet pressure on his eardrum throbbed with his pulse. “The pliers in the tool box. Get me the pliers.” He stretched, felt the nut that held the tube flush to the underside of the faucet and put his finger over the leak. A trickle ran down his arm and into his shirt. His other arm ached from holding the wrench in place; its handle felt huge and unwieldy, and he couldn’t help thinking it was his father’s wrench, that he shouldn’t have it. Thomas’ most vivid memory of his father was of a huge man bending over him, hand raised, screaming, “Don’t mess with the tools,” and then the slap. Thomas’s dad disappeared when Thomas was six. Now that he was a dad himself, he thought about his own father a lot. Even though the tools belonged to Thomas, he seldom took them out.

Thomas waited. Water pooled between his shoulder blades and crept along his backbone. “Dolby?” The back screen door slapped shut.

“Ah, hell.” Pulling his hand out of the gap increased the spray and shifted the wrench on the sink trap. An ooze of black slime slipped out of the joint, hung from the bottom of the pipe and dropped into his mouth. He spit hard as he extricated himself from the cabinet.

The shut-off valve spun freely when he twisted it. Flicked with his finger, it whirred like a propeller. Water dripped onto the green tile his wife loved, but only reminded him of his kitchen when he was a child, the place of many arguments between his father and mom. Thomas had warned his wife that old country homes like this were maintenance nightmares, but she hadn’t cared. Leaky pipes the first month we live here, he thought. Heaven help us in the winter. He pushed a towel against the cabinet base to soak up the water.

Thomas picked up the tool box and headed for the cellar. In the living room, his wife lay under a fuzzy, blue and yellow afghan, a washcloth folded over her eyes. Thomas said, “I’m going to have to find the main water cut-off.”

She nodded slowly.

He said, “Another headache?”

“Little one.”

“What about our dinner?”

“I called the sitter.”

Thomas slumped. “I was looking forward to getting out together. The two of us.”

She lifted her hand, waved it languidly like a handkerchief towards him. “My head.”

The tool box’s handle was cutting off the circulation to his fingers; their tips tingled. He shifted it to the other hand. “Maybe we ought to see somebody. You got one of these the last time we were going out.”

She sat up; the washcloth dropped off her eyes leaving a red stripe across her face like a broad swath of Indian war paint. “If you really want to, we’ll go.”

“No, no. I’m just saying you get a lot of headaches.”

She pressed the washcloth to her eyes and sank back to the pillow. Thomas started to speak but didn’t. She was motionless, absolutely rigid, frozen.

He asked, “Did you tell Dolby he could play with the camera?”

“He said he wanted to film a dragon. I can’t talk to him.”

Thomas said, “That’s a thousand dollar piece of equipment,” and it sounded to him like his father speaking.

She sighed from under the washcloth.




Thomas shined the flashlight up into the floor joists. He had only been into the cellar twice, first when the realtor showed them the water heater was new and second when he carried the love seat they didn’t have room for down the rickety wooden steps. He thought the cellar was a creepy and ugly place. In the cobwebs dozens of pipes and wires went every direction. Some pipes were obviously old plumbing that hadn’t been removed when new ones were installed, and it looked like new plumbing had replaced old several times. He thought some of the pipes must be for gas, but there was no way to tell immediately what did what, what went to what, and what was functional. He tracked an insulated pipe from the water heater to a junction where one pipe veered towards the bathroom and another disappeared under the kitchen with several other pipes into a hole that was dripping steadily. He couldn’t tell which pipe carried unheated water.

Dolby’s behavior preyed on Thomas’s thoughts, but more than that, his reaction to his son bothered him. Nothing he said ever seemed to penetrate, like the boy purposefully ignored him when he spoke. And what worried Thomas was he believed he behaved that way when he was a child. He remembered Dad talking to him, but remembered little he said. Like Dolby, he had lived by his own agenda. After Dad had left, Thomas had a dragon of his own. He had to have one. No one ever listened to him, he had thought. Now Dolby was fascinated with them.

He played his light around. Except for the love seat, this end of the long, narrow cellar was almost empty. The old water heater, a huge, rusting tank with a grate for coals under it stood next to the new heater, a gleaming white eighty-gallon Sears model that seemed out of place.

At the other end, against a rough stone wall with chunks of mortar missing, a ladder stood in a broad pool of water that covered a third of the cellar. He shined his light on the rippleless surface, wondering how deep it was and if there might be snakes or rats. He guessed there must be a way to drain the cellar. After a few minutes of opening and closing the many fuse boxes cluttered with knife switches and fuses as big around as shotgun shells, most that didn’t seem to be connected to anything, their wires hanging loose, he found a button marked “sump,” and without much hope, pressed it. In the lowest corner of the uneven floor, a low gurgle showed the pump worked, and immediately water began sliding towards it. He set the ladder under the kitchen and climbed carefully to the pipes.

Lines of yellow drops marched away from the hole in the floor down the pipes to release one by one several feet away. The plink of dripping water and the heavy, humid air made the cellar seem subterranean, like he was hundreds of feet underground instead of a few steps from his kitchen. He braced his hand on one of the joists and an inch of rotten wood sloughed off. The splinters felt spongy and weightless in his fingers. He dug his screwdriver deeply into the joist. He figured, at least here, only the sheer mass of the thick timbers kept the house from collapsing into its own foundation. He gazed sourly at the other joists and wondered how much more damage he would find as he searched for the main valve.

Two pipes rattled loosely when he shook them. A rusty iron one he guessed was the gas, and a slightly newer pipe he hoped was the water line. He followed it with his light as it went through joist after joist until it ran down the wall and into a wooden hatch set into the floor next to the old water heater.

A leather strap served as a handle. He wrapped it around his hand and grunted as he pulled the water-logged door open. A moist, vegetable smell floated against his face when he lay on the floor to look into the hole. Green and black fungus coated all eight of the valves within. Fortunately, the new valve was on top of the old ones. Thomas reached down, spreading his legs for leverage, and he twisted it. The valve creaked, but didn’t move. His fingers slipped.

He slid more of his chest over the hole, bracing himself with one hand against a wet pipe. He heard someone on the stairs.

“Daddy, I’m filming your feet.” The camera’s bright light filled the top quarter of the hole, but the contrast made Thomas’s hand invisible. He couldn’t tell what he was holding onto.

“Dolby, come shine the light for me.”

“I can’t. I just wanted another blank tape. I’m recording the dragon.”

“Tapes are in the TV cabinet, but come hold the light first.”

The light blinked out. Dolby’s feet pounded across the kitchen. Thomas sighed and waited for his eyes to adjust to the dim light from his flashlight that was on the edge of the hole. He twisted again with no result. The valve was too slippery.




Thomas rummaged through the drawers in the kitchen looking for a rag. His wife mopped water off the tile.

“Why don’t you turn the water off?” she said.

“The valve’s stuck.” He picked up a cloth placemat and held it up to her.

“That’s our wedding present from Aunt Mary.”

“I’ve never seen it before.”

“I’m waiting for a special occasion.”

He put it back in the drawer and opened another filled with plastic spoons and forks. He shut it.

“What do you need?” she asked.

“An old towel or something.”

“I threw them out when we moved.”

“What can I use?”

She dropped the mop—its handle bounced—dug impatiently into a laundry basket and tossed him one of his older shirts. “There.” The shirt landed at his feet, a sleeve draped over his left foot.

“How’s your head?” he asked.

“Wonderful. I can stand it. A flood in the kitchen doesn’t help. I thought men were supposed to know about plumbing.”

“My dad never taught me,” he said.

“Fine, then, blame your dad.”

“Sorry,” he said, and felt awkward because “sorry” wasn’t really the right response. He picked up the shirt. “It’ll be dark soon. Don’t you think Dolby should come in?”

She sat in a kitchen chair, massaged her eyebrows with her thumbs. “He says he’s found a dragon. Have you been telling him stories again? If he wakes up screaming tonight…”

Thomas squeezed the shirt into a ball. “One dragon story months ago. If he ignores it, it will go away.”

“The dragon or the nightmare?”

“Yeah,” said Thomas.

“You call him.”

Thomas put the shirt on the table and opened the back door screen. His wife rested her face in her hands. He saw just her nose and a slice of her lips.

The last edge of the sun setting behind him, Dolby stood on a stump in the back yard pointing the bulky camera at the roof. Thomas called him.

“I can’t come now, Daddy. He’s right above you.”

Thomas resisted the urge to look up. “Don’t make me tell you twice.”

Dolby jumped down and stomped into the house, the camera slapping awkwardly against his legs. Thomas turned sideways to let him in.

“Did you see him?” said Dolby, his face red and angry. “Is it the same one?”

“No,” said Thomas.

“Don’t you want to see him?”

“What I want is for you to get ready for bed.”

“I’m going to watch my tape.”

“It’s after your bedtime. No TV after bedtime, son.” Thomas let the door swing shut behind him. The screen pressed against his palms like coarse sandpaper.

“I want to watch this, though. I filmed it.”

“No.”

Dolby glared at him and then at his mother, her hands still over her face. “It’s not fair!” He threw the heavy camera on the floor. Something delicate crunched inside; a lens rolled across the tile and under the refrigerator.

All of Thomas’s muscles locked. For a second he could see himself stepping forward, bringing his hand around and slapping his son, a full body weight swing that would take his head off. So Thomas didn’t move. He knew he couldn’t move.

The boy, crying, ran out of the room. His feet drummed on the stairs, and then his bedroom door slammed shut.

Water hissed out of the leak under the sink; a new peninsula of wetness formed on the recently mopped floor.

Thomas exhaled and realized he’d been holding his breath, then said, “What are we going to do?”

“I’ll pick it up.”

“About Dolby. What are we going to do about him?”

His wife bent stiffly, as if her back hurt too, and lifted the camera by its strap from the floor. Broken parts shifted inside. “He’s your son.”

“Our son.”

“I didn’t tell him about dragons.” She dropped the camera in the trash can.

“Maybe it can be fixed.”

She snorted. “I’m going to bed.”

“I’ll turn the water off, and then be up.”

She paused at the doorway, rested her hand on the door frame. “Don’t bother.” Her head leaned against her arm. “I’ll be asleep.”




In the cellar, the flashlight flickered. Thomas slapped it angrily against his palm and the light brightened to a dull yellow. He shined it the length of the cellar towards the sump where the floor glistened, but the pool was gone. The pump’s motor whined. Black algae covered the stone floor. He wondered how long it had been since the pump had been turned on and how algae could grow without light. He discovered the float valve on the sump was missing. If he hadn’t come downstairs, he figured, the bearing would have burned out by morning. He pressed the button on the wall, and the motor’s noise dropped into the silence of dripping. Water stained the rough stone walls. How often did the cellar need to be pumped?

At the trap door, he dropped onto his chest, reached into the hole and wrapped the shirt around the valve. It turned stiffly, and the constricted water shrieked at the end of the last rotation. Thomas rolled to a sitting position, suddenly exhausted.

Gradually, the flashlight dimmed, then winked out, and he lowered his head to his forearms.

He thought about his father who had never taught him anything, except maybe that you can always run away. He didn’t know much about him. A few photographs and a box full of tools were all he had, and now Thomas had to raise a son. Thomas remembered one evening a week after Dad had left. He sat dry-eyed but desperately alone on his kitchen porch step. The horizon glowed faintly orange. The dragon came to him, flying out of the sunset, then landed in the yard and consoled him. For a year after whenever he was most alone, the dragon came. When the hurt faded away, when Thomas found other friends, the dragon quit coming. Thomas hardly missed him. But now, he thought, he would rather have had a father. What does a father do? he thought. What does a father do when his son doesn’t listen to him and his wife is so distant that when they are in the same bed late at night the father is afraid to breathe because she may hear him? Thomas’s father had taken the magic escape. He had ridden the dragon and never returned.

Thomas sat in the dark with his eyes closed until his back and thighs ached from the cold floor.

When he looked up, he saw the cellar was not unlit. The hot water heater’s blue-flamed pilot washed a cool and steady light the length of the room. Shadows were deep, black and long. The wet floor glistened like a still ocean under the moon, and from floor to ceiling, tiny mirrors of quartz or mica in the stones reflected stars of pure blue. His cellar suddenly seemed to him the most beautiful place he had ever seen. He imagined he could form constellations from the reflected points, name them anything he wanted, after his dad, his wife, his son, himself.

His back cracked when he stood, and all the stars changed. His own shadow blocked out half the room. He picked up his tools and climbed the stairs.

Under the sink, the steady hiss of escaping water was silenced. Thomas mopped the floor again, squeezing the mop dry after each pass across the tile, filling a bucket half way. When he was done, he stored the mop and bucket, rung out the towel he’d placed under the sink, hung it to dry, and, after making sure the kitchen was in order, opened the screen door and walked into his back yard.

His neighbor’s cornfield on the other side of the fence rustled like a thousand sheets of paper rubbing against each other, and the moon glowed in the tassels. Thomas faced his home; light from the kitchen streamed through the door and windows. His bedroom window on the second floor was dark. Dolby’s was lit. On the roof the dragon lay, straddling the apex. As long as the house, its tail looped around and under its front paw.

Graceful as a cat, the dragon came down and stretched itself at Thomas’s feet. He could hear its breathing, low and rumbling, and when the dragon turned his head toward him, its eye was big as a manhole cover. A clear membrane flicked over the eye from below, changing it from green to milky gray for an instant and then back. Then the dragon turned its head away and lowered its shoulder. Thomas saw the flat place behind its head and in front of the wings. A place where a man could mount and hold on.

Thomas stepped forward and stroked the dragon’s neck. The skin was warm and the scales finely textured like silk. Thomas said, “I know why you came back, but I can’t go with you. That was my father’s choice.”

Under the moon, in the night, in Thomas’s back yard, the dragon raised his head and looked down at him. Thomas said, “I have to fix the plumbing.” The dragon’s breath growled. Thomas added, “I have work to do.”

Thomas walked inside and started to shut the door. The dragon’s eyes followed him. Thomas lifted a hand to wave. “I’m sorry,” he said.

In the kitchen, he waited until he heard noises like gusts of wind, the huge wings flapping. He listened until he couldn’t hear them anymore, and then he headed up the stairs.

At the top, he paused. The house was quite. No dripping. The pressure was off. Thomas knocked on his son’s door. “Dolby, we need to talk.”




JUST BEFORE RECESS


Parker kept a sun in his desk. He fed it gravel and twigs, and once his gum when it lost its flavor. The warm varnished desktop felt good against his forearms, and the desk’s toasty metal bottom kept the chill off his legs.

Today Mr. Earl was grading papers at the front of the class, every once in a while glancing up at the 3rd graders to make sure none of them were talking or passing notes or looking out the window. Parker would quickly shift his gaze down to his textbook so Mr. Earl wouldn’t give him the glare, a sure sign that Parker’s name would soon go up on the board with the other kids who had lost their lunch privileges for the day. He could feel Mr. Earl’s attention pass over him like a search light.

Slipping a pebble out of his pocket, Parker carefully lifted his desktop a quarter of an inch and slipped the rock in. It made a tiny clink when it dropped to the bottom. He leaned the desk away from him until he heard the pebble roll toward the sun, followed by the tiny hiss that meant the rock had vanished into it.

Two days ago he’d opened his desk to put his lunch in, but instead of the pencil box and tissue box and books he expected to see, a cloud swirled in the space, at its center, a dull, pulsing red glow. He shut the desk and looked around to see if anyone else had noticed. An hour later, the dusty swirl in his desk had contracted to a bright spot in the middle. He cautiously moved his hand toward it. At first he felt only the heat, but when he got within a few inches, the skin on his palm began to sting, like the flesh was pulling away. He snatched his hand back, then tried a pencil. When the point moved close enough, the pencil tugged toward the sun, then snapped out of his fingers into the tiny light, brightening it slightly in the process.

Now the sun was as large as a golf ball. When Parker rolled a marble across his desk, its path would curve toward the sun within, sometimes circling several times before resting exactly above it.

“Parker,” Mr. Earl said. “Your reading group is waiting for you.”

In the back of the class, his three reading partners sat on the mats, their books on their laps. Parker pushed away from his desk and joined them.

“Where’s your book?” Mr. Earl said, his eyebrows contracting into a single line above his eyes.

Parker shrugged. Mr. Earl growled. “You need to be more responsible, young man. Go get your book.”

The other students looked on, relieved that Mr. Earl’s attention was on Parker and not on them.

“I don’t have it, sir,” said Parker. It had disappeared into the sun along with everything else.

Mr. Earl’s hands clenched slightly. Parker cringed as his teacher pushed away from his desk. Mr. Earl almost never left his desk. Students came to him. He didn’t go to students unless the infraction was terribly, terribly bad.

“You, young man, are irresponsible. Remember our talk about responsibility on the first day of school?” He looked at each of his students who nodded in turn. “Isn’t your book in your desk where it belongs?”

“No, sir,” said Parker. How could he explain about the swirling dust, the pulsing red glow, the sun’s pinpoint of light?

“Of course it is. That is where your books should always be. Everything in its place. A place for everything. Isn’t that right?” His question sounded like an accusation.

Parker nodded. “But my book isn’t there, Mr. Earl.”

The teacher took two long strides and stood beside Parker’s desk. Before the boy could speak, Mr. Earl threw the desktop open. For a second, he stared into it. A white glow reflected off his face. “What is this?” he said, as he reached toward the brightness.

“Careful, Mr. Earl,” Parker started to say, but it was too late.

The teacher screeched before lurching against the desk. He went down quickly, his feet vanishing into the desk last.

A long silence filled the room. Parker stood, walked back to his desk. The sun within had grown, its heat baking like a tiny oven. He closed the top, which snapped down hard on its own at the last moment.

The other students hadn’t moved. Parker looked at them. They looked at him. Over the intercom, a bell softly chimed.

“Recess,” said Parker, and they all ran outside to play.




O TANNENBAUM


Christmas is about friends. You have to believe this and not get discouraged. Look around you. Everyone here is poor—some poorer than you—some are crazy, but look at them, eating turkey generous people donated, opening baskets full of clothes that are meant for them. All gifts of love. All symbols of human kindness. Today, of all days, you can’t give up.

Here, pull up a chair. Grab a plate of turkey. Go ahead. Fill it up with dressing too. Everybody always shares. As long as I’ve lived, people have been kind. Maybe today I can give you a little in return for all that’s been given me.

So there won’t be any surprises, let me tell you something straight up front about me as an explanation. This Christmas Day, I turned twenty-one—it’s my birthday, I think, but not for sure. It’s different for me. Lots of people don’t know for certain when they’re born. They’re abandoned at birth, so a birthday is assigned to them, probably one pretty close too. A baby, you can tell within a month or two how old they are, but that doesn’t work for me. See, I have to count days, because for me, it’s always Christmas.

Well, that’s not exactly true. Lately it’s been Christmas—the last five years ago or so, and for the five years before that, it was the last day of the Saturnalia. And before that, one kind of winter solstice celebration or another as far back as I can remember. My years, of course. Not your years. Really, for me, it’s always Christmas.

Like this morning, I woke up in this shelter. The cot felt solid under my back, and the bed roll was worn but clean. Smelled old, you know, but not bad. Some folks were already stirring.

Guy next to me sat up coughing. Young looking fellow. Maybe my age, but a real dry cough that doesn’t bring up anything, and he kept going for a couple of minutes.

“Got to quit these coffin nails,” he finally said, lighting one up, tears still streaming down his cheeks. He took a deep drag. “Gonna be a good one today. I can tell,” and he offered me a smoke. See, first thing that happened to me today was an act of generosity.

I shook my head. People moving all around. Elderly ones, or the touched ones, talking to themselves. Bundled up, mostly. Like that guy over there—three trashed coats and two grimy scarves. Hat pulled over the ears. It’s warm in here, but homeless folk hold their clothes tight.

Gina entered my head then. I hadn’t thought of her at first, and that made me sad, you know, ’cause every time we talk now it’s probably the last. Without a miss for two-and-a-half months I’ve called her in the morning to say hi, to see how she is.

My months, that is, not yours. Like I said, every day is Christmas for me, and for me, two-and-one half months ago was 1915 when this soldier I met, Humphrey, asked me to call Gina. He sat next to me in the trench; I’d found out earlier in the day that we were twenty miles south of Verdun. German trenches were a hundred yards to the east, but you couldn’t see them. Broken spirals of barbed wire, torn up dirt, a busted ambulance were all I could see. Night had fallen, and it had gotten very cold. A sentry walking by, head low, broke through a layer of fresh ice that had formed over the mud, so every step crackled, then squished. We had to pull our feet back to let him pass. The soldier’s boots made a silly little squeaking sound when they pulled free.

Humphrey laughed. He was tired and scared, an eighteen-yearold Brit with a downy, blonde moustache and bloodshot eyes. He laughed at the ridiculous sound though, and then he started telling me about his family and his girlfriend, Gina. He talked for an hour, low and passioned and non-stop. He made me swear to contact her if he didn’t make it home.

“It’s Christmas,” he said, and he didn’t say anything about where we were or what we were doing. He leaned his head against his gun and shut his eyes and by the light of the winter moon told me about Christmas in Lancashire, where he was born. I wish you could have heard his voice, kind of low and broken. He was a lot more down than you. “They’re roasting chestnuts,” he said. “And eating quince pudding, and telling each other stories. My Uncle Charles will bring out a cask of stout—he makes it himself—and they’ll tap it open. He’ll pour pints all around. Charles and Aunt Edna will be pie-eyed and toasting to the King’s good health. Gina will be with them.” Humphrey paused for a long time at that. No other sounds up and down the trenches, just cold, milky light pouring down on us, and the air like ice razors pressing against our cheeks. Finally, he breathed, “Oh, Gina, my good girl, my black-eyed girl.”

“Do they sing carols?” I asked. It had been a good day for me. Everyone clapped me on the shoulder. Ruddy faced fellows, mostly young, like myself, like you. “Merry Christmas, old sport,” they’d say. “Separated from your company, are you?” and they’d offer me stiff shots of warm brandy from hip flasks that suddenly appeared.

“Yes,” said Humphrey. “They sing ‘O Christmas Tree.’” and he started to sing it, very softly, and I could tell he was crying. His voice, clean and clear, carried in that icy air, and it seemed like the only sound in the world, all tied up in the night sky and the moon and the barbed wire, and when he got to the part that goes, “They’re green when summer days are bright; they’re green when winter snow is white,” his voice cracked and he could go no further.

It was the saddest thing I have ever seen in my life: Humphrey slumped down in the bottom of the trench, lost and far from his home, from his Gina, the marvelous dark-eyed Gina who was hanging popcorn strings on a Christmas tree in a fire-lit room surrounded by Humphrey’s parents and sisters and brothers and Uncle Charles and the homemade stout a million miles away.

And the echo of Humphrey’s Christmas carol still rang in my ears, and I realized it wasn’t an echo. It was the same tune, but the words had changed. Humphrey looked up too. He canted his head to one side and listened. Clear, so clear, as if the singer was in the trench with us, we heard a voice singing Humphrey’s song. It sang, “O Tannenbaum, O Tannenbaum…”

Humphrey hopped up then, and so did I, and looked across the no man’s land. A face looked back. A German face under a pointy helmet, and he waved a tiny, white handkerchief at us. Humphrey dug into his back pocket and waved his own handkerchief. I don’t know who climbed out of the trench first, the German or Humphrey, but I followed Humphrey across the cratered ground to the broken lines of barb wire in the middle.

Humphrey didn’t even pause at the wire. He stepped over it, his hand out, “Merry Christmas, old chap,” he said.

“Frohliche Weihnachten, mein freund,” the German said back, and they shook hands.

I stood behind them, arms wrapped around me against the cold. The moon, bright as any flare. All the way up and down the lines, as far as I could see, men were tentatively climbing out of trenches, walking toward the enemy, embracing, pulling out pictures to show each other.

Humphrey handed me a flask, his eyes shiny, his face alive with merriment. “It’s Schnapps,” he said. “It’s Christmas Schnapps.”

I fell asleep that night in the trenches, and I woke up the next day, a year later on Christmas in a hospital in London. Called Gina on the telephone. Told her I was a friend of Humphrey’s. Found out he had died in January, but she was so glad to hear from me. Asked me if I was the “Yank” Humphrey had written to her about.

We talked a long time. It was another good day. In the hospital they brought in big baked hams. Cut them up in the wards. Even the sickest of the sick. Even the amputees and fellows who’d been gassed in the battle who couldn’t hardly breathe, were happy. I made sure they sang “O Christmas Tree,” because I knew I’d made a friend. For the first time in my life I could talk to one person from day to day. Gina told me to keep in touch. With the telephone, I could. No matter where I was on Christmas Day, I could call her.

So when I woke this morning, the man in the cot next to me offered me a smoke. A fellow from the kitchen told me that they’d be serving turkey and all the fixings in a couple of hours. Some kids from the high school were coming over later to carol with us. I asked him where the phone was. Yesterday—last year—Gina wasn’t doing so good. Her heart, she said, was weak. “But you’re sounding good,” she had said.

“Yeah,” I said. “The years have treated me well.”

I made the call. She’s in a nursing home in San Francisco. Moved to America in ’57. I was afraid. The phone rang for a long time. Not many nurses on Christmas morning, and then someone answered.

I asked for Gina. Gina who, she said, and I told her. “I’m new here,” she said. “I don’t know that patient.” Papers shuffled around on her end. She put the phone down, and someone mumbled to her in the background.

You’ve got to understand. I’ve never known anyone for more than a day. A day is all I get. I don’t understand why. When the morning comes, I wake up, and it’s Christmas. Sometimes I won’t sleep for a couple of days, but everyone sleeps. It can’t be avoided. Maybe I vanish in the night. Maybe a year later I appear when no one is looking. Who can tell? I always wake up in a place where a stranger could go unremarked, an army, a hospital, a festival, a flop house and soup kitchen like this one. I don’t know if it’s a curse—there’s lots I don’t know—but all I get is a day a year, and I’m a stranger that no one knows.

Then Gina came on the line. It was her voice. I’ve heard her grow old. “Hello, old friend,” she said. “Merry Christmas.”

“Merry Christmas,” I said.

Each year she’s been there. Each year. She’s ninety-six now. I’m twenty-one today. It’s my birthday. In three-hundred and sixty-five years for you, I’ll be twenty-two, but I want to tell you something. It’s important I think.

I hear rumors of bad things in the world. I hear about wars; I’ve even seen some, but in my experience, human beings are good. They’re generous. They share with strangers, and they reach out to someone they’ve only talked to on the phone once a year for eighty years. If you could just see things from my perspective, you’d understand, even without friends, people are good. There are reasons to hope.

You shouldn’t give up. People will help.

And you know what else? I wonder if you could do me a favor. You could? Great. I wonder—would you mind if I phoned you next year, here? Do you think you could find your way back here on Christmas to take my phone call? It would mean a lot to me.




NIGHT SWEATS


July 31, Friday Afternoon: Moving In




In space’s far reaches, red-shifted radiation marks the universe’s beginning, a microwave ghost forever lingering after the Big Bang. When amateur astronomer Meadoe Omura puts her eye to the telescope to see her favorite nebulas, she travels backward in time, and light travels both ways. On August 6, 1945, a great flash illuminated Hiroshima. Photons, radiation, a radio pulse blasted into space. Years and years later, an attentive observer on one of Earth’s nearer star systems might catch the twinkle. The past made present, living in the eye.

What has passed does not disappear; it recedes, ever fainter, but never gone, remaining, a ghost. Like what lived in the old house in Harriston that Meadoe bought, like what lived in Meadoe.

In 1945 her grandfather worked a job on Hiroshima’s outskirts, excavating defense bunkers, when the sky turned bright, so terribly bright, and seconds later the dirt buried him and the others. The story stuck with Meadoe and when she was a little girl she had nuclear nightmares: a bomber’s high altitude roar, the peace of an early morning city, a mushroom cloud rising and rising. She thought about Hiroshima a lot, as she studied the stars, when she read quantum physics.

But today Meadoe wondered, should I have bought the house? She stood on the porch, the new key unfamiliar to her touch. It cost so much. The apartment was fine. I could have taken another path than this one, like an electron. She thought about uncertainty. In quantum physics it meant that one could never tell both where an electron was and how fast it was going. It seemed an electron was in all the possible places at the same time. She’d tried to explain that to Joan, her therapist, once, but by the time she got to tachyons, a particle that appeared to travel backwards in time, Joan’s eyes glazed over.

Of course, in my case, she thought, the uncertainty principle just means should I have signed a thirty-year mortgage?

What had looked like pleasant landscaping swallowed the house, and the house itself leaned over her, large and quiet.

Her radio was already unpacked—the movers must have set it up—so she turned it on and an oldies station playing a big band number crackled into life. She opened boxes until late.

After eating part of a casserole, after screwing in the new deadbolts, after finding a nightshirt and blankets and a bedroom lamp, Meadoe went to bed.

She fell asleep before she had a chance to hear any sounds her new house made.

At 4:30 a.m. Meadoe woke. For a while she lay still, trying to figure out where she was and why she was so warm. Her blanket felt pounds too heavy, and her arm under the pillow buzzed with the numbness of sleeping on it wrong. A streetlight cast a pale white shaft alive with dust motes through her window. She decided she was awake for good and might as well unpack some more.

Meadoe sat. “What the heck?” she said into the strange room. Her nightshirt clung to her, and when she pushed the blanket aside, it was soaked. She wrapped her arms around herself and shivered. When she stood by the bed and looked down, there, in sweat, was her outline.




August 1, Saturday Morning: Therapy




Joan said, “The key to your present is in your past.” She consulted her notes, her briefcase open on the couch. Curtains still weren’t hung, but the house had begun to look like home. Books were dusted and in the bookcase; her antique hook rug covered most of the living room floor.

Joan flipped to a new page and clicked her pen. “You’re still virgin.”

“Thirty-two years and not a tumble.” Meadoe kept her hands still in her lap. Old ground it might be, but she didn’t feel comfortable discussing it.

“You told me something happened in high school.” Joan flicked back a few pages. “Christopher Towne. Basketball player. You knew him from church. He liked the same books you did. On the third date at the Deer Trail Park picnic area he tried…”

“Yes, but he stopped.”

“Before he started, did you want him to?”

“What?”

“Start.”

Joan hadn’t asked that question before. Deer Trail Park sat at the end of a long dirt road south of town. When they’d pulled into the parking lot, Christopher dimmed his lights to keep them from shining into other cars. She picked out Ursa Major and Minor through the front windshield. Beyond the city, the stars glittered so clearly. Meadoe shut her eyes.

“I knew kids made out there. I suppose I wanted to.”

“You suppose?”

“I wasn’t really sure what making out involved. I was fifteen. Nobody had talked to me about it. I thought it would be like Wuthering Heights. I never thought about sex. I still don’t.”

Joan coughed. Meadoe knew she did that to cover a snicker. “So, you thought one of you would die and the other would pine forever? That’s ambitious for a third date.”

It had been in early November, a few days before her birthday, which is why she remembered—the first cold night of the fall. Windows were fogged in the other cars. Chris had taken her to a movie, then headed to the park without asking.

“No, what I like about Wuthering Heights is the second part anyway, after Catherine dies and Heathcliff keeps searching for her. Wuthering Heights is a bad example. Maybe I thought we’d hold hands. You know, and then kiss on the porch when he dropped me off.”

Joan wrote in the notebook. “Sheesh, were we ever that young? Hadn’t you ever had a sexual fantasy with Christopher in it before? You knew you were going on the date; you’d been out with him twice already; didn’t you think about anything more extensive than holding hands?”

They had held hands. He turned the engine off and moved next to her. Her hands clasped in her lap, like they were now, and he gently pried one free. She remembered she’d almost giggled at that, partly from nervousness, and partly because it all seemed so awkward. His fingers slid between hers; she couldn’t tell if it was her sweat or his.

“I played with dolls still when I was fifteen. I read The Girl Scout’s Guide to the Stars,” said Meadoe. “I know it sounds silly, but I thought of myself as a little girl. Holding hands was the extent of it. Maybe carving our names in a tree.”

She’d thought she should sigh when he squeezed her hand, but she didn’t. Her neck muscles bunched; blood pounded behind her eyes. Now that they were there, she longed to leave. Her lips snapped as they parted. “I want to go now,” she tried to say. Nothing came out. Chris slid closer. Her left hand was trapped in his; her shoulder pressed against the door, and he leaned to kiss her. There was no place to go, so she let his cheek push her head back to kiss her. It seemed bizarre. No passion within her. If he’d stop, she could ask him if it felt weird to him too. Kissing her hand would be as romantic as this. Rubbing a washcloth over her lips would feel no different. His breath heated her neck, and her shoulder ached where the door pushed into it.

Chris leaned against her harder, turned toward her and wrapped his left leg over hers, forcing her knees apart, pinning her to the seat. He kept kissing her mouth, then the side of her face, breathing hard. “Meadoe,” he gasped. His hand worked its way into her blouse. Meadoe tried to twist away from the door, but she had no strength; it was as if her spinal cord had been cut—total paralysis. In her head she chanted “I want to go home now,” in a Dorthyesque way, as if tapping her ruby slippers together would take her from the car.

Joan said, “So when do you think your emotional self caught up with your physical self?”

Meadoe shook her head, her eyes still closed. Chris pulled his hand from her blouse, popping a button. He tugged her belt with one hand and pushed her hand against him. “Meadoe,” he said again, his breath full of after-dinner mint. Finally, she found her voice. “I want to go home now,” she said. “I want to go home!”

“This is home,” said Joan.

Meadoe opened her eyes, fingers digging into the chair. “Did I say that out loud?”

Joan looked at her thoughtfully. “I think we’ve covered enough ground for today. But I’ll tell you what, when we meet again I’ll want to know what you are really afraid of.” Joan closed the notebook and put it in her briefcase. She put on her jacket. As Meadoe opened the front door for her, Joan said, “Meadoe, there’s two kinds of people who say they don’t think about sex—the ones who do and lie about it, and the ones who do but repress it.”




August 1, Saturday Afternoon: The Wallpaper




Standing on the porch, her arms filled with contact paper to line the kitchen drawers, Medoe fumbled with the lock. The new deadbolt resisted turning at first, then suddenly released. Meadoe imagined for a second someone on the other side had twisted it for her. The radio played the oldies station where the announcer said, “And now Glenn Miller and his band playing ‘Boulder Buff,’ featuring Billy May on trumpet.” Uneasy, she looked around the room. It wasn’t like her to leave the radio on. Nothing in the living room was out of place, the back door was securely locked, and the windows were latched.

She sat on the edge of her bed to kick off her shoes. For fourteen years she’d lived in the apartment two blocks from the library. In this new setting, her own furniture looked changed, as if someone had stolen her belongings and replaced them with clever counterfeits. Even the air felt alien and smelled strange.

The bed felt good though, so she flopped back. A dozen chores waited. More unpacking, setting up the telescope, but her motivation was shot. Is it true, she thought, that I’m thinking about sex all the time and don’t know it?

Through the uncurtained window, the afternoon sun cast a square of warm light on her legs. She was trying to make patterns from the swirls and texture in the ceiling plaster when she noticed the wallpaper in one corner had peeled away from the wall. Changing the wallpaper topped her project’s list, so she levered herself out of bed, slid a stool under the corner and pulled off the first layer. Several sheets stuck to it. The room’s history unpeeled in wallpaper. Under a pale yellow, a horrible brown and white geometric; under that, a green marble pattern; under that, a solid pink. The base wasn’t wallpaper however. After clearing several feet—the paper fell away easily—she stood back. A movie poster: The Outlaw, starring Jane Russell and Jack Beutel. No date, but old, and the paper was laminated to the wall. Licking her finger, she rubbed at a spot, cleaning it. A varnish, she guessed.

A half hour later, all the wallpaper lay crumpled on the floor, and an entire collage was visible: from ceiling to floor and wall to wall, posters, magazine covers, newspapers and pin-ups, carefully arranged, varnish protected, in beautiful condition. Hand drawn scenes: girls in bathing suits and war planes: whoever assembled the display was an artist. Life magazine pictures of models on beaches: July 9, 1945, a dark-haired woman wearing a striped two-piece suit, her hand to her brow as if looking into the ocean; April 17, 1944, Esther Williams standing in front of a giant sea shell; Rita Hayworth sitting on a towel, August 11, 1941. The magazines cost a dime. Other Rita Hayworth images, mostly from movie magazines including a Time Magazine painting of her, one hand over her head, her other behind her as if the artist had caught her in a twirl, her dress billowing, showing a lot of leg. Ingrid Bergman looked doey-eyed on a Casablanca poster, but most of the women she didn’t recognize: Martha Raye, Betty Grable, and Maureen O’Hara. Unfamiliar movies: Four Jills in a Jeep, Destination Tokyo and Haunted Honeymoon. In the background, the radio announcer talked about “our boys in the Pacific.” Meadoe cocked her head to listen, but a song started, “The Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy of Company B.” She rubbed her arms, suddenly chilled.

To one side, surrounded by war news, a striking drawing of a Japanese woman pursing her lips at a microphone, a rising sun flag behind her. Bare shoulders, half turned, the flag snapping in a wind. Underneath, the card read, “Tokyo Rose.” Meadoe touched her own face whose high cheekbones and slanted eyes were mirrored in the drawing. Of all the drawings, this was the best. More life—a sensuousness in the mouth, in the twist in the neck.

“He did a lot of work here,” she said to herself. Clearly this was the effort of a young boy. Pin-up girls and war photos. She looked for dates. Nothing past July, 1945. Everything was vivid, though. No fading. The display must not have been up long before being covered. Why?

The setting sun touched her neighbor’s roof; she glanced at her watch. There was time to set up the telescope for a little early evening viewing. Tomorrow she could tackle the collage’s mystery.

Once the sun set in the back yard, the air cooled quickly and mosquitoes buzzed. Meadoe slapped at her bare leg as she tightened the viewfinder bracket that held the equatorial mount. The counterweight nearly slipped from her hands when she maneuvered it onto the shaft, but soon she was making the fine adjustments to the viewfinder and the clock drive.

A breeze rustled the lilac. Meadoe rubbed her arms. In the moon’s sterile light, the neighborhood metamorphed into a black and white photograph. Shadows too black to peer into. Trees without color. She thought again about the pictures on her bedroom wall, and turned to look at the house. Gray, moonlit shrubbery rustled. Moon reflected off the back door. The pale green siding now looked white. Meadoe rested her hand on the telescope, at ease for the first time in several weeks. Moving’s stress had taken more from her than she thought. It would be a relief to return to work.

She brushed her fingers over the telescope’s thin metal, an old friend. They’d spent hours untangling the universe’s many twined lights. As long as she had the telescope and the night sky, she’d never be truly unhappy, regardless of whatever Joan said about unacknowledged desires. She chuckled in relief.

Then, a movement caught her eye. She stayed her hand on the telescope. Had something behind her bedroom window shifted?

Whatever it was, it wasn’t moving now. Standing stone still, she studied the window. Was that a reflection off wavy glass? Or was it a face looking out? Her eyes froze open; she couldn’t take them off the image. Had she locked the front door? She knew she had, or at least she was pretty sure she had. She always locked the door when she came in. Of course, she always turned off the radio when she left, but hadn’t it been on when she came home?

Keeping her head steady, her eyes focused on the window, she took a step to the left, away from the telescope. The face disappeared.

She stepped back. Moonlight did reflect from the window; the glass was wavy, but it didn’t look like a face now, only like shimmery glass. There’s no way I could mistake that for a face, she thought. There’s no way. She moved again, tried to see a forehead in the reflection, a cheek’s curve, the dark shadow under a nose. Maybe it was there, but the moon had advanced in the sky a tiny bit. Maybe the image required an exact alignment of light and viewer. Maybe there was no image at all, only nervousness about a new house.

Never looking away, she unscrewed the counterweight and slid it off the shaft; its bulk filled her hand reassuringly. The porch door creaked. Meadoe reached around the corner to turn on the light. Shadows fled, and within seconds moths fluttered against the screens. She repeated the move on the back door; the back of her hand and wrist screaming their vulnerability when she stuck them in the dark to find the switch.

Light flooded the empty room, and the rest of the house was just as empty. In her bedroom, feeling foolish, she put the counterweight on her dresser.

The posters on the wall almost glowed. Meadoe sat on her bed again, as she had in the afternoon, and studied them. Ingrid Bergman looked wistfully into the distance. Fred Astaire danced across a ballroom floor. The wolf man glared straight into the camera. Planes diving. Battleships sailing. VICTORY IN EUROPE trumpeted a headline. It’s practically a museum, she thought. A moment in time captured on the wall. She thought of her own photographs taken through the telescope, also snapshots in time. The scale was different; some of her subjects were millions of years away, but the principle was the same. Captured time.

She squinted at the wall. There was a pattern in the design, an order. Not straight lines, but lines nonetheless. The Life covers formed three curves; the hand drawings two more; the movie poster swept in their own arc. News articles and war photos filled the gaps but created a sight line too. It took her a while to decipher the underlying purpose, but as she lay on the bed, letting her eyes roam from image to image, it became clear. All lines led to Tokyo Rose. No matter where one started, the natural flow was to the Japanese beauty.

Later, she read with all the lights on, then decided that was silly. She checked the doors and windows again, flicked the living room and kitchen lights off. With only her reading light on, she closed the book and rested it on her chest. She listened with half an ear to a radio drama about someone named the Great Gildersleeve. Some of it was pretty funny, and it took her mind off sounds she couldn’t identify: a metallic rattle that might be a pipe expanding, a thump and buzz that might be the refrigerator cycling, a dog barking. There wasn’t enough light to see the posters now, and the window was a gray square leaking moonlight. She worried that someone might look in, and she laughed. No matter what side of the window I’m on, I’m scared of the other! Tomorrow she would hang curtains.

She turned off the radio and the light and slipped into a dream. It seemed she’d slept for a long time, and she knew she was dreaming. In the dream she rested on a white beach, like one of the models on the cover of Life, like Rita Hayworth, and the sun beat down hot, oppressively hot. Overhead a plane rumbled across the sky, too far to identify, but clearly military, a B-29 maybe. She rolled. In the dream she shifted away from the sun, but she felt blankets on her shoulders and knew she rolled in bed too. It was so hot. I should find some shade, she thought. I need sunscreen. Waves hissed in the dream. Heat shimmered off the sand blurring the horizon.

Someone stood beside her. It was too hot on the beach, and it robbed her strength, but she could feel him standing there. For a long time he said nothing, and she thought, if only he would set up an umbrella.

Then, he touched her back. His hand was smooth, and the overheated skin felt instant relief. She closed her eyes against the brightness, could feel sand beneath her cheek. The hand moved. It stroked to her shoulder blades and down to the base of her spine spreading coolness the whole way. Meadoe moved into the stroke. Then softly, a voice in her ear.

“Do you trust me?”

She woke, screaming, and the bed was sweat-soaked again. She had to flip the mattress before putting on dry sheets.

In the morning, her linen drawers were open and once folded clothes piled messily within.




August 2, Research: Sunday Morning




The library didn’t open until noon on Sunday, so Meadoe disarmed the alarm system before entering. The lights were off. Flyers from different publishing houses touting their newest releases covered her desk, and she moved them aside to give herself room to work. The Real Estate/Assessor’s Office didn’t have a web page but the City and County Records Office and Building Permits did. She punched in her address. After a few seconds search, a list of names and dates scrolled onto her screen with her name at the bottom. From 1928 until 1945 the house had two owners: the Belascoes who owned it until 1940, and the Shirleys who owned it until September of 1945. Since then the house had changed hands seventeen times. The realtor said young couples bought the house, and then moved out when they had children. Meadoe tapped her fingernail against the keyboard. She typed in her neighbor’s address to the north, a house that looked very much like hers from the street. Three owners since ’45. The house to the south of her, four owners in the same time period. Across the street, two owners. She checked another dozen addresses in the neighborhood. None had more than four owners since the end of World War II.

Scrolling back up the screen, she returned to the Shirleys. Howard J.T. Shirley bought the house in May of 1940. Margaret L. Shirley cosigned the loan. Wife? Mother? Sister?

A name search for Howard J.T. Shirley brought her to a Shirley genealogical site where she found he died in 1982. Margaret L. Shirley, his wife, died two years later. The site listed one child, Nathaniel Shirley, born January 15, 1929, died August 6, 1945. He was sixteen when he died, the same day the atomic age opened its awful eye over Hiroshima. Meadoe could hear her father’s voice, thickly accented, “Your grandfather dug all day for the rest of his friends. Dirt covered their faces. There were scars on his arms from broken glass in the rubble.”

Nothing turned up on a search of Nathaniel’s name.

The historical archives were in the basement. Turning on lights, Meadoe worked her way to the local history shelves. On the top row, Harriston High School annuals. Nathaniel smiled from the juniors section in the 1945 book, and the little hairs on her arms stood straight up as they had when she’d pulled down the wallpaper. She wished she’d brought a sweater.

Nathaniel had light hair with a shiny, sculpted look that most of the boys sported. Glasses. He wore a dark tie, white shirt and dark jacket. Varsity track. Art club. She thumbed through the annual. Grainy black and white photos of football games and victory gardens. At the homecoming dance, several boys were in uniform. Some downtown Harriston buildings in the background of the homecoming parade were familiar.

Prom pictures were in a copy of the school paper, The Lions Roar, stuck in the back of the book. On the second page, she found Nathaniel, his arm around a pretty girl with dark hair like her own, but curled instead of straight, hanging to her shoulders instead of trimmed to just under the ears. The caption read, “The Prom’s best couple: Junior Nathaniel Shirley and Senior Erica Weiss.”

Meadoe went back to her computer. If Nathaniel did the wall art, he didn’t enjoy it long before he died. Why did people move in and out of her house so often? Thoughtfully she typed in a search for “ghosts and poltergeists.” Her research offered numerous explanations for ghosts and hauntings. One source suggested that ghosts wanted attention. That’s why so many of them threw things. Another argued that poltergeist phenomena was caused by the emotional upheaval of someone in the house, generally a pre-adolescent girl. Was she effectively pre-adolescent? Could her house be responding to her? One ghost hunter said ghosts recreated the circumstances that held them to the earth. Another maintained ghosts existed because they had unfinished business.

In the August ’45 Harriston Independent, on the second to last page, she found Nathaniel under the headline, “Truck Strikes Local Youth.” He’d been crossing the intersection of Harriston Boulevard and Broadway when a milk truck hit him. The paper reported Nathaniel died at St. Joseph hospital that afternoon of head injuries. Beside the article was the same class picture she’d seen in the yearbook looking so formal, so young in his coat and tie.

Before going home, she stopped at the video store.

“Do you carry The Outlaw, with Jane Russel?” Meadoe asked.

The teen cashier keyed the title into his computer and shook his head.

“Four Jills in a Jeep?” On the wall beside her, Meadoe counted at least 60 copies of the latest release. “How about The Haunted Honeymoon or Destination Tokyo?”

“Nope.” He hit a key that brought up more information about the films. “Jeeze, those are old. You’d probably have to order them special.”

“Casablanca?”

“That we have. Two copies. The film’s in black and white though. I’m supposed to tell you that because some guy rented it last year and raised a stink because he thought it was defective.”

At home she phoned Joan. “I’ve got curtains to put up you can help with, and a video to watch if you aren’t doing anything.”

“I’ll bring wine,” Joan said.

In the middle of the afternoon, the whole ghost theory seemed suspect. Certainly the apparition in the window could have been her imagination, and maybe she’d messed up her own clothes in the dresser in the middle of the night. She’d never done that before, but she’d never moved into a house of her own either, nor had she had night sweats.

Which was Joan’s point an hour later as they hung the bedroom curtains. “There’s numerous medical reasons for profuse sweating. You’re young for it, but it could be early signs of menopause.”

Joan pushed a hook into the drape’s back while Meadoe held the fabric up. None of the windows were standard width, and the curtains really should have been special ordered, but Meadoe couldn’t afford that. Custom curtains were on the lengthening list of home improvements. She tried to keep her tone light. “Oh, no. It couldn’t be that. My grandmother had a child when she was forty-three.” A medical condition? she thought. Her father spent four months in a hospital dying of colon cancer when she was twelve. She remembered how frail his arms became—how thin his face. Cancer killed her grandfather too. Slow mushroom clouds erupted in his lungs, a part of Hiroshima’s omnipresent past.

Joan took three hooks from her chest pocket and moved down the drape, pushing each one in. “That’s the benign explanation. Anxiety provoked by severe repression could cause it too—a purely psychological symptom—but night sweats can accompany diabetes, M.S., AIDS, polio and a half dozen other things I can’t think of off the top of my head. First things first, we ought to get your estrogen checked.”

In Meadoe’s bedroom, Joan examined the wall for a long time, touching some of the pictures, then moving back with her head cocked, as if she were in an art gallery. “Whew! And you think this was all done by a sixteen-year-old?”

“No more than a month before he died.” Now that Meadoe had seen the pattern that drew her eye to Tokyo Rose, it seemed it should be obvious to Joan too, but Joan didn’t seem to notice it.

“I always liked ’40s hair styles. They struck me as more… deliberate. This low maintenance look we all go for now just isn’t as romantic. There must be a half a can of hair spray on that woman’s head. Oh, look at that.” She had found Tokyo Rose. “She looks a little like you, Meadoe. Did you notice that? She’s beautiful.”

“We all look alike to you.” Meadoe laughed.

“There’s more of the west in you than the east, girl.” Joan put a stool under the curtain rod and hung the drapes. “There, now you won’t be wondering about peeping Toms in the shrubbery.”

Over a glass of wine, Meadoe told Joan about her scare the night before and the dream. Meadoe looked into her glass as she spoke. Remembering the touch on her back raised new goosebumps. She could still feel the fingers over her skin.

“Doesn’t the timing of these things strike you as fortuitous?” said Joan. “I mean, it’s pretty obvious that the evening I bring up a delicate topic in our session—ask you what you fear most—your subconscious supplies fears. Of course, the face in the window is symbolic in some way. It could be your repressed self looking out at you, or it could be Christopher Towne coming back in your imagination.” Joan laughed. “Or it could have been a funny trick of light. Not everything has a psychological explanation. The dream now, that is interesting. What were you wearing in it?”

Meadoe shook Casablanca from its plastic box and put it in the VCR. “I don’t know. I suppose a bathing suit. He touched bare skin.”

Joan settled onto the couch after slipping a coaster under her wine glass. “How do you know that he was a he? You said you only saw feet.”

“I… I don’t know that either. In the dream I assumed it was a man.”

Meadoe sat on the couch. Joan moved over to accommodate. It was more of a love seat than a proper couch, not large enough for Meadoe to stretch out to take a nap on.

“And you said when he touched you in the dream you liked it? I’d say that was a good sign. It’s obvious the dream has sexual overtones, and you welcomed them.”

“The sun was hot. I was burning up, and his hand was cool. Do we have to talk about it? The movie has started.”

Black and white maps appeared on the screen with a voice over. Lines traced a path through Europe to Casablanca. The narrator said of refugees without visas in Casablanca that their fate was to “wait and wait and wait.” She thought about Nathaniel Shirley. What if he was a ghost in this house, caught in his sixteenth year, and like the refugees, looking for a way to escape?

An Englishman wearing a monocle said, “We hear very little, and we understand even less.” Meadoe nodded. That made sense. She hadn’t seen Casablanca before, and it struck her as funny. The music seemed overstated, and the acting stilted. A plane flying in one scene was clearly a model, and the Germans were stereotypical. She wondered how Japanese were portrayed in other films from that era.

Then a woman walked into the cafe. Ingrid Bergman. The prefect of police said to her, “I was informed you were the most beautiful woman ever to visit Casablanca. That was a gross understatement.” Meadoe leaned forward. It was true. She was beautiful. A fragility in the face. Flawless skin. A half smile that changed her appearance from somber to knowing. The pictures on Nathaniel’s wall didn’t do her justice.

Joan picked up her wine glass and sipped from it. Somewhere in the film Meadoe stopped thinking of it as stilted. Her own wine warmed on the table. At the end she cried so hard that Joan put her arm around her until Meadoe giggled at the ridiculousness of it.

“It’s all right,” said Joan. “There must be something in the story that speaks strongly to you. That’s why movies are such a powerful medium. They help us live the tales we can’t tell ourselves.”

An hour after Joan left, Meadoe didn’t feel tired at all. Normally she was in bed by 9:00 before work, but her mind raced with a million thoughts. With the curtains up, the house seemed homier, more enclosed and safer. She picked up a book, reread the same page twice without understanding a word; put it down. She looked into all the rooms for the tenth time, and then decided a shower might relax her. Afterwards, wearing a robe, she poured herself another glass of wine and started the video again.

She noticed details she missed the first time. The young woman who sought Bogart’s help was in the opening crowd scene hopefully looking at the plane overhead. Every time an Italian military officer appeared in the film, everyone ignored him. Senor Ugotti said to Bogart, “I have lots of friends in Casablanca, but just because you despise me, you’re the only one I trust,” which made Meadoe smile. There were jokes in the first half of the film she hadn’t got earlier. She poured more wine, feeling a pleasant torpor steal over her and closed her eyes. One of the books about ghosts said spirits were doomed to replay the circumstances of their deaths over and over. Is it like video, Meadoe wondered, or can it be changed? Bogie never gets the girl.

In the film, Sam sang “As Time Goes By.” Meadoe drifted. The tune went on and on. “And you must remember this, a kiss is but a kiss, a sigh is but a sigh.” She felt she wasn’t on her living room couch anymore, but in a theater watching Casablanca on a movie screen, back row. Silhouettes of heads filled the seats in front of her, the woman’s hair curled and styled. A curl of her own hair blocked her vision. But my hair is straight! she thought. She shook her head to move it. Buttered popcorn smells. After shave. Plush underneath her hands.

Bogart stared down a glass of whiskey. “Of all the gin joints in all the world,” he said.

Slowly, Meadoe realized someone’s hand was on top her left one, the fingers clasped around her hand, very proper and gentle. She didn’t move, but let it rest there. It didn’t make her feel anxious. Her stomach didn’t tighten. This is a good dream, she thought; no contact phobia. Joan would be proud.

At the roulette wheel, the young woman’s husband won a lot of money. Bogart had rigged the game so they would win and she wouldn’t have to make an unnamed sacrifice to save them both. Everyone congratulated Bogart, and he squirmed. Meadoe sighed. The scenes no longer seemed to be in order, but she liked it just as much. She leaned a little to rest her head on her companion’s shoulder. The theater air washed her in warmth, very warm, and sweat trickled down the side of her face. She didn’t mind though. She was comfortable. “Yes, Ugotti, I do respect you more,” said Bogart.

Her companion turned in his seat. She knew it was a he, and his hand came across her to stroke her other arm. His breath touched her cheek, but she kept watching the movie. Bergman told her husband she’d been lonely in Paris, but she didn’t tell him about Bogart. She didn’t tell him she’d fallen in love.

The hand on her arm moved. It stroked the side of her breast. Now Meadoe wasn’t really watching the movie. She heard it behind closed eyes. Everything was gentle. Not like the time with Christopher Towne. Very slow. And the air almost burned, as if she faced an oven, but the hand was cool and slow and pleasant. She knew she sat on her own couch in her own livingroom—she knew she was dreaming—but she also was in a theater. Both places at once. Not alone in either place.

Sam sang again, “It’s still the same old story, a fight for love and glory, a case of do or die.”

Meadoe sighed. Made a small sound in the back of her throat. Heard herself make it and thought, I’ll have to be quiet, or I’ll wake myself from this dream.

The hand moved again, to the front of her blouse, parting the cloth (doesn’t it have buttons? she thought), and the coolness was on her bare breast, holding it lightly, barely stroking. She turned to offer herself more easily, her breath caught high in her lungs, her skin a thousand times more sensitive than she’d ever felt it before.

Then a loud click. She sat straight up on her couch. The video had finished and ejected. She shook suddenly and realized she was covered with sweat, literally dripping, and the front of her robe was open.

She showered again before going to bed.

Monday morning, on the way to the library, Meadoe bought the video.




August 3 and 4, Monday and Tuesday Night: In the Interim




It took willpower to undress for bed both nights. Even with curtains, Meadoe felt watched. Pictures of her parents on her dresser seemed to have been rearranged. The medicine cabinet door opened on its own accord. No matter where she tuned the radio, it eventually played oldies. She listened to Chet Huntley read the news from a station she couldn’t get in the car and there was no listing for in the newspaper. It played polka favorites for an hour at 7:00.

When she finally turned out her light, she lay rigid on her back, hands at her side, looking at the ceiling. Did a floor board creak? Did the spoons drawer rattle in the kitchen? She thought, if I shut my eyes and then open them, will a face be staring into my face? Dare I sleep? Can I?

Then so softly at first, so imperceptibly she wasn’t sure it hadn’t started much earlier and she’d dismissed it, a voice talked steadily. It rose and fell. No words she could distinguish, but it lasted a long time. When it broke off, she stopped breathing, listening as hard as she could. Then sobbing. A young man’s muffled weeping as if it were miles away. It was hardly there—no more than wind against the house; no more than a whisper of a sheet dropping across a long, long room, but it was beside her too.

When she slept, she didn’t dream. She woke refreshed.




August 5, Wednesday Afternoon: An Interview




Meadoe stood in front of the impressive house for a long time before ringing the bell. What if she decides I’m a loon? She stepped off the porch, thinking she might be able to slip away, when the front door opened. An elderly woman with thin, white hair, heavily powdered, held the doorknob.

“You’re the young lady who called from the library? I’m Erica Weiss. Come in. Come in. I’ve made coffee.” Her voice was surprisingly full considering her age, and Meadoe entered the living room.

“Thank you for having me.” Dozens of framed pictures hung on the walls from long wires attached to the ceiling molding. The room smelled of vanilla and hand lotion. It wasn’t an unpleasant smell but a strong one. While Erica went to the kitchen for the coffee, Meadoe examined the pictures. There were photographs of family groups wearing late 1800s clothing sitting on the grass. Servicemen looked out from some of the pictures. Wedding portraits, graduation photos, parties, snowfalls. Meadoe recognized a younger Erica in one picture standing with what might have been parents. One was of her wedding. The groom wore a formal military uniform.

“I lost Robert in 1983,” said Erica, carrying a tray with cups and a coffee pot. “We’d just inherited the property from my mom and dad. He had a stroke while adding the garage.”

“I’m sorry.” Meadoe sat on the edge of the couch, unsure how to ask her questions, unsure, now that she was there that she wanted to ask them.

The elderly woman said, “It’s a long life, but you’ve got to live every minute of it. We had a few good years.” She balanced a cup on her knee and filled it with coffee, then filled the other and handed it to Meadoe. “I contributed to the oral history project a few years ago. Young man with a tape recorder came out and asked questions for a couple hours. Nice fellow, from the university. Don’t know what he did with all that blather.”

The coffee nearly blistered Meadoe’s lip. She blew across it and took a sip. A rich blend with a hint of licorice. “This is more for me than the library, I’m afraid. I wanted to talk about high school, about Nathaniel Shirley. I moved into his house.”

Erica put her cup on the table, then hid her hands in her lap. “What made you come to me?”

“Your picture together in a yearbook. I found drawings in the house that were his. Good art.”

Erica swayed a little, and when she reached for her coffee, her hand shook with a palsy Meadoe hadn’t noticed earlier. “He never drew me. I asked him to once, but he said he didn’t have the skill yet. He wanted to get me right.” Her voice quivered, not nearly as full as it had been at the door. She wiped at her eye. “Sorry, the infirmity of age. So many old friends have passed. I guess Nathaniel was the first.”

“Can you tell me about him?”

“It was a long time ago.” In the parlor a clock chimed the hour, six mellow gongs. Afternoon sun fell in a narrow strip along the carpet in front of the living room window. Meadoe drank again, almost holding her breath, barely noticing the scalding liquid.

“We started dating at the beginning of my senior year; he was a junior. Many of the older boys had left to Germany or the Pacific so the girls dated younger. He was a beautiful boy. Did you see his picture? He had long fingers, like a sculptor. I thought it was just a fling, of course, so I had a beau at Homecoming.” Erica sighed. “Girls now don’t understand what it was like then, I think. If a girl today likes a boy, she just asks him out. The feminists have it right; it’s a better system, but then—oh, then—a girl sat by the phone. He took me to Homecoming, and we had fun, but I didn’t fall in love until the next week. We were in choir. One morning I walked into the room, and there was a drawing of Tokyo Rose on the blackboard, a huge one done in colored chalks—he could really draw Tokyo Rose—and underneath he had written, “Erica Weiss is lovelier than Tokyo Rose.” He didn’t sign it, but we all knew, even the teacher. She didn’t erase it. It stayed there all period.”

Meadoe considered the room, the woman. It was hard to imagine her as a high school senior. In the pictures, she was pretty, curly black hair, bright eyes peeking at the camera. Meadoe couldn’t see the young woman in the old one. “I don’t know how to ask this; it sounds rude, and I don’t mean it to be, but I need to know. Were you two… serious? I mean… were you close?”

“Very close.” Erica looked at Meadoe and blushed. “Oh no, nothing like that. It was 1945, after all. Not today. We never… not ever. Good girls didn’t.”

“That’s not what I meant to imply.” Meadoe tried to smile, but that was exactly the question she wanted answered. The pinup girls. The touch on her back, the sitting on the couch in front of Casablanca were so sexual.

“Well, we were people, of course. Young people. I think most old folk forget how high their juices used to run, and the young ones, of course, believe they’ve invented sex. We thought about it. We wanted to, but I was firm. I was proper.” She looked past Meadoe at the pictures on the wall. “Most of the people I grew up with are dead now. I have their photographs.” She paused. The clock ticked. Meadoe cupped her coffee, warming her hands. “During the war young kids had less opportunity than they have now. They chaperoned the dances. My mother called slow dances, ‘vertical fulfillment of horizontal desires,’ and the chaperones separated you if they thought you were too close. We thought about it though, what with the boys going away to war. Some girls absolutely thought it was their patriotic duty.”

“But you didn’t?”

“No, we never did.” She looked miserable. “I graduated in ’45, and I was going to go to college. He still had a year left, but he told me he was signing up that summer, the summer he died.”

Talking about his death seemed to have exhausted her, so Meadoe helped put away the coffee cups.

“Did you see Casablanca with him?”

Erica closed a kitchen cabinet softly, hiding cups and saucers by the row. Meadoe believed most were never used, that the old woman took out the same cup or two everyday but never any more. The house seemed bigger now, and more empty.

“We did. At the Denham for an encore showing. It was a couple of years old by then.”

Meadoe remembered the popcorn, the quickening of breath. “Did you sit in the back row?”

They walked toward the front door. Erica paused. “Funny question.” She rubbed her brow in thought. “Yes… you’re right. We did. How did you know?”

Meadoe shrugged.

They said goodbye, but before Meadoe moved to the porch, Erica put her hand on Meadoe’s arm, stopping her. The old woman’s eyes were watery and pale, her gaze steady. “In August that year, my aunt in Fort Collins became ill. My mother left me alone in the house for three days. I was eighteen. She said she trusted me. For the first time since Nathaniel and I started dating we had an empty house. I was going to go to college. He was joining the army. I called him. He was coming to see me when he had his accident.”

Meadoe nodded dumbly. The woman’s grip was intense. Her mouth grim. “He never would have been in the intersection if I hadn’t called. All these years, all these years I’ve known, Nathaniel Shirley died because of me.”




August 5, Wednesday Evening: A Visitation




Meadoe left her car in front of Erica’s house and walked home, deep in thought.

Erica’s look stayed with her. The old woman’s grip on her arm. The way she said “Nathaniel.” Never “Nathan.” His whole name over and over again. When she’d spoke her final words it was if all the time between had been erased. As if only moments before she’d hung up the phone and sat in her empty house waiting for a boy who never arrived.

A half hour later as the dusk deepened, she rounded the corner onto her street. No cars were parked in front of the houses for once, and none of the neighbors were in the yards. Dinner time, she thought. But as she walked, she slowed. No cars. No people. Just the elms’ lazy sway, the stillness of summer lawns, the day’s last heat baking through the sidewalk. She turned to look behind her. For a moment nothing moved, and she marveled. This could be 1945, she thought. I have no evidence otherwise. Nathaniel might have seen his street just like this. A plane hummed away in the sky. Sunlight caught it there, way above her, like a golden cross: a four-engined golden cross. She thought, is that a B-29? But when she blinked, it became a jet. A car turned up the street, a mini-van that turned on its lights as it passed, and the moment vanished.

At first in the darkness inside her house, Meadoe didn’t notice the disarray. Silverware on the kitchen floor stopped her. Drawers were open. Canned goods scattered across the counters. Couch cushions were on the floor. Art hung crooked on the walls. Meadoe, clutching her hands to her chest, moved into her bedroom. Sheets on the floor. Dresser drawers open—one was across the room—her clothes emptied from them. Windows and doors were locked. Nothing missing. Nothing broken. Meadoe picked up methodically. Why would Nathaniel act out this way? Was it because she visited Erica?




August 5, Wednesday Night: Anniversary




Later, she prepared for bed carefully: a long bath, a single candle lit on the tub’s edge, the remains of the wine Joan left. The radio played a nonsense song, “Mairzy doats and doazy doats and liddle lambzy divey.” She washed her hair in the tub, sinking back until the water covered her ears, muffling the radio. Everything in her bunched together in tight fists, her stomach, her lungs, her back muscles, as if a race were about to start, but she forced herself to go slow. The wine tasted good. Warm water held her in its hand. Time felt mushy and possible.

She thought about the night of August 5, 1945, where the Enola Gay waited for its atomic payload; its crew slumbered in the barracks, while Erica Weiss’s mother packed for a trip to Fort Collins. Erica lay down to sleep, thinking about a phone call, thinking about long kisses held on a porch, thinking about a sculptor’s fingers sliding across her shoulder, touching her cheek. Nathaniel Shirley stared at his collage until midnight, hearing planes in his ears, watching Ginger Rogers spinning across a dance floor. “Here’s looking at you,” Bogey said at an airport in the fog. Nathaniel’s eyes always ended at Tokyo Rose, her dark hair, the twist in her neck. He thought about touching that hair, except it was never Tokyo Rose he touched in his imagination. It was Erica; her hair curled and smelling of shampoo. Meadoe’s grandfather in Hiroshima slept. Old, old light from stars so distant a million lives might have come and gone glittered in the sky.

Meadoe rubbed herself dry. Left the door open. She felt his eyes on her. Pulled on panties and a night shirt and headed for bed. She remembered the Casablanca dream where she sat in the theater. In the dream she’d directed herself. She’d turned so her companion could touch her. In the dream she’d had free will. In the dream she’d had curly hair.

11:55 p.m. The clock flicked to a new minute. Meadoe lay on her back, eyes part open but drifting, just on sleep’s edge, pleasantly buzzed. A wine glass sat on the night table where she could reach it. The radio played in the background, soft dance tunes, horns and clarinets. Big bands. Meadoe licked her lips. Felt herself doing it, knowing that she was almost asleep. A bead of sweat trickled down her forehead. Under the covers, heat pressed her on all sides. Moving slowly, concentrating on the buzz like a pressure point behind her eyes, she pushed away the blanket so only the sheet covered her.

In a dream now, she sat in her front parlor. Sun poured through the front windows. The house was almost intolerably hot, and even leaving the doors open didn’t help, but Erica, wearing a thin cotton blouse and shorts, didn’t consider it. Mother had been gone for two hours now. She wouldn’t be back for three days. Erica’s hair stuck to the side of her face, but it was nervousness, not the heat. On the table, the phone waited.

Nathaniel could be here in thirty minutes. Erica thought about his laugh. The way he touched her face. How when he was in the room she felt watery inside and hoped that he would hold her. The phone clicked when she lifted it.

In Meadoe’s home, the bed creaked; She incorporated it into the dream, turned it into a creaky chair. Erica held the phone, listening to the dial tone, in the dream, and Meadoe moved aside without opening her eyes both in her bed and in Erica’s front parlor. A weight lay beside her, scarcely breathing, and the air baked in the room. For a moment, nothing moved. The dial tone hummed. Meadoe’s heart pounded in her ears. A tug on the sheet. It slid off. Erica dialed the operator, waiting between each digit, trying to stay calm. A jostle in the bed. Lips on Meadoe’s neck. She scrunched her eyes tight, forcing herself to stay both in the dream and in her bed. A pressure moved off her arm; a hand, moved down her side, over her hip and then rested on bare leg. Meadoe breathed a sound at the touch, tried not to move. What if the hand went away? She desperately did not want to wake.

Meadoe held the phone. Pushed her curly hair away from her eyes. One ring. Two rings. In her bed, the nightshirt pushed up, uncovering her belly. Caressed, she pushed into the weight beside her. Felt his length, the heat of him. The hand moved off the middle of her chest. Slid down. Sweat coated her. She floated in it. The fingers paused at her pantie line. She wanted those fingers to keep moving. Wanted his touch.

She talked on the phone too. Nathaniel said he’ll come.

Erica… Meadoe… Erica… she didn’t know who she was, breathed hard. He’ll be here soon, Meadoe thought. Mother is gone. Mother is gone. He’ll be here soon.

The fingers stayed still, but the heel of the hand moved closer so Meadoe knew the fingers must be bent, his beautiful, sensitive sculptor’s fingers. She gasped, not afraid now that he would hear, and then the fingers slipped farther down.

Meadoe moaned, reached and grabbed the wrist, preventing him from going any lower. “Wait,” she said into her room’s hot, dark air. “Wait.”

Erica put on her shoes. She thought, I should wait. But she opened the front parlor door, rushed. In the dream, Meadoe/Erica ran up the street. Her house was closer to the intersection than Nathaniel’s. She should get there first. Her feet blurred beneath her. Up the long hill, made the intersection. He was not there yet. Traffic held her for a minute. Cars, trucks, military vehicles. She crossed.

Meadoe held the wrist. She ached, but she didn’t let it move.

A minute later, she saw Nathaniel. He was running, but when he noticed her standing there, he slowed to a walk. A grin stayed on his face. The smile was infectious, and Erica smiled back. They hugged at the same moment across the globe a bomber dropped its single bomb. Roared frantically away. Meadoe Omura’s grandfather lifted dirt by the shovelful from the bunker. Around him, other workers moved wheelbarrows, carried brick, mixed cement.

The traffic light changed, Nathaniel started across, but Erica held him back. A milk truck slammed through the red light and continued down the road. Erica smiled even broader. The bomb burst and the atomic age arrived. Quantum theory made real.

Nathaniel said, “Wow, good thing nobody was in the street.”

Erica nodded. She didn’t let go of his arm.

“Pretty warm out, don’t you think?” Nathaniel said.

Erica shaded her eyes. “A bit. Maybe we can go some place out of the sun?”

“Do you have something in mind?”

“Oh, yes,” she said, and they walked toward her house.

In her bedroom, Meadoe held the hand still under her belly, and she walked hand in hand with Nathaniel down Harriston Boulevard. They went in her front door. A brief kiss. A fumbling with buttons and snaps. They laughed in the afternoon’s warmth, nearly stifling in the house, oblivious of heat and atomic bombs and milk trucks.

Meadoe forced her eyes open to the bedroom’s darkness. Their laughter rang in her house, echoey and distant. Moonlight slanted through the window, gathered in a form lying beside her.

His eyes were open, staring into her own across the years. Young eyes, long dead. They blinked.

“I’m not who you think I am,” said Meadoe.

The voice barely made it to her ears. It could have been no more than a breeze outside. Her own heart thudding in her veins. As light as a lover’s touch. “I know, Tokyo Rose,” he said, then the room was empty and twenty degrees cooler.




August 8, Saturday: Final Reel




“So you haven’t seen evidence of the ‘ghost’ since Wednesday night?” Joan pulled her notepad from a briefcase. She was in her therapist’s mode now, harder, more brusque than Joan the friend.

“No. He’s gone.” Meadoe leaned back in her chair.

“How can that be? You didn’t change history. He still died on August 6, 1945. You told me Erica Weiss believed it was her fault, that she still believes it, so why would he disappear?”

Meadoe smiled. “I don’t know, really, but I don’t think I changed history. I changed the ghost. It’s quantum physics, like I told you before—the uncertainty principle. Individual electrons are in all possible positions. History plays itself out in all ways.”

“Parallel worlds?” Joan wrote on the pad, and Meadoe couldn’t tell if she was taking her seriously or not, but she didn’t care. Couldn’t Joan feel it in the house? How much sweeter the air was? How much easier it was to breathe?

“Maybe, but I don’t think it’s that simple. Parallel spirits maybe. The worlds aren’t discreet. Nathaniel intersected here. I just showed him another way it could have turned out.”

Joan tapped her pen against the page. “You sound different. What’s going on?”

“Remember last week when you asked me what I feared most?”

Joan nodded.

“I found out what it was, and I conquered it.”

“In the dream?

“In the dream.” She remembered holding Nathaniel’s hand back. She’d said, “wait,” and he’d stopped. The power was in her then; it was in her now. She had control. “Come on, I want to show you something in the bedroom.”

“What?”

“You’ll see.”

In the bedroom, Joan looked around. “Did you clean the windows? It seems brighter in here.”

Meadoe shook her head. She hadn’t noticed it before, but Joan was right. The room was brighter. She sat on the edge of the bed, waiting. Joan paced the room.

“Look at the collage,” said Meadoe.

Joan contemplated the wall and found it almost immediately. “Where’s Tokyo Rose? And who is that? How did you get that picture under the varnish?”

Meadoe smiled. She’d seen it Thursday morning when she awoke, happy, nearly ready to sing, and she’d lain in the bed in languid glory. Her eyes followed the Life covers to the drawing, only it wasn’t Tokyo Rose anymore. Smiling from the penciled portrait, as stunning as any of the movie stars, a black-haired girl, curls waving around her ears. Erica Weiss. In Nathaniel’s hand, a date, August 7, 1945.

Joan said, “He was already dead.”

Meadoe bounced against the bed’s edge. “Just in this world, Joan. Just one of him.”




TEACHING

		When I heard the learn’d astronomer,



		When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,



		When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide,



		and measure them,



		When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with



		much applause in his lecture room,



		How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,



		Till rising and gliding out I wandr’d off by myself,



		In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,



		Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.








    

—Walt Whitman






William stared at the DeskTop unit for a long minute before sighing wearily and opening it. It was the latest release of the hardware, and its shiny surface felt softer than his old one, like leather, and it opened easier too, popping slightly as the fold vanished into an unmarked screen. The keyboard flopped open and the unit, no thicker than a sheet of cardboard, was ready to go. His earphone squeaked in his ear, then announced that beside the normal traffic of essays, tests, video demonstrations, speeches, and other student work which the DT had already evaluated, commented on and recorded into student profiles, he had received sixty-four messages since yesterday, two which might require his attention. He eyed the three column list: mostly run-of-the-mill correspondence that included a couple of thank-yous from departing students and eight petitions for admission into his class from the retiring Leslie Franklin’s roster. None seemed out of the ordinary, so he okayed the virtual-William’s handling of them and the unit instantly sent pseudo-personal replies that mimicked his style and provided the individualized, educationally appropriate prompts to each student. V-Bill, William thought, a friendlier, more professional, patient and approachable version of myself.

The two flagged messages he put aside for the moment, though a flashing reminder in the corner of the work space reminded him not to forget them.

Eight new students pushed his class list over six-hundred for the second time this month, so he called up and signed a standard request for numbers reduction and sent it to Central Education; as he expected, the reply, with its somber logo of Socrates teaching a group of rapt students, scrolled instantly on his screen acknowledging his request while extolling the virtues of the profession and how “We must each make the sacrifices in these challenging days of tight budgets.”

He ran the numbers over again in his mind. If he spent only five minutes on each student, and he worked ten hour days, he would get to each student once every five days. That was assuming that all he did was contact students, but most days, he’d spend the morning handling unique student problems, addressing paperwork concerns or corresponding with Central Education. Only in the afternoons that he wasn’t sitting in on group hook-ups through the DTs or going on field trips like today’s could he contact his students individually.

William sighed again and let his eyes rest on Leslie’s photograph that sat on the shelf above his table. He thought, she always knew how to handle the load. Her dark eyes focused somewhere to the side, behind the photographer; a strand of red hair blew across her cheek and she was laughing. In the background, a fountain sprayed into the sunlight, each drop catching a glint of brightness. She’d signed it herself and real-mailed it forty-four years ago when they were both students in the first totally DT school to graduate with teaching degrees.

While pouring coffee from his single cup brewer, he thought about how controversial and cutting edge school had seemed then. The DT monitored and measured their progress every step of the way, providing instant feedback. No waiting for papers to be graded. No weeks of not “getting” the material until some the teacher noticed (if she or he did at all) the problem. No moving through the curriculum at the “average” student’s pace while the slower ones fell farther and farther behind and the quicker ones grew bored. The teacher, through the DT, recognized their strengths and played to them; identified their weaknesses and helped them address them. It had encouraged William to do group projects with Leslie. Their learning styles complimented each other well, and they’d pushed each other to co-valedictorian status.

Through the DT, education had become again that visionary ideal: one teacher to one student. Grades were replaced by competencies. When they demonstrated they knew the material they moved on. He remembered when students were “graded,” and the whole idea seemed ludicrous now. He and Leslie had joked about it. Leslie had said, “Any grade other than an ‘A’ indicates that learning isn’t done yet.” William agreed then. He still agreed, but he couldn’t muster any passion for the thought. He put his coffee down. It tasted dull and flat this morning.

Although William had never physically met Leslie—she lived in Vancouver while the farthest north he’d gotten was Wyoming—they’d kept in close contact since graduation through their DeskTops. Over the years, gray streaks gradually marked her auburn hair, but she laughed the same way and often. Every once in a while, he’d see a glimpse of the pose in the photograph. His fingers ached to type her code to tell her “Hi,” to find out how she would face the day, but she’d told him that her DT would be locked away for months while she real-toured Europe. “I’m going to touch the Arc de Triomph,” she’d said crustily to him last week. “And I don’t want some voice in my ear telling me anything that I can’t learn by being there.”

Six hundred students, he thought, and Leslie’s not here to lighten me up.

He tapped the blinking reminder, calling up the two problem messages the v-Bill couldn’t handle.

Fourteen-year-old Kimo Yu’s mother died yesterday, the first message said, and she wouldn’t be able to make today’s field trip to the canyons of Canyon Lands National Park. William scrolled through her history: generally a type four, agressive/abstract learner, she’d made good progress in spatial visualizations and practical math. Her current area of interest, geology, didn’t fit her vocational potential profile well, but the DT had planned a course of study that would funnel her back into her strengths by the time she was sixteen. The DT highlighted a closeness to her mother and recommended a two week suspension of instruction, followed by a gradual reintegration into the program with an emphasis on spiritual and grief relieving literature. William noticed Guenther’s Death Be Not Proud on the reading list and deleted it. “Too grim,” he muttered.

He studied her image for a moment: thick glasses—glasses were in again as a fashion accessory—covering non-oriental looking eyes, then he recorded a personal condolence and sent it. He couldn’t recall ever meeting her, and the DT confirmed that in her six years of study under his guidance, they’d never crossed paths.

The second message came from Jonas Wynn’s father. Jonas, the note said, had dropped his student DT out the window of the Tampa to Denver transrail at better than one hundred and forty miles an hour. Not only did Dad have to explain to transrail officials how his son could get what was supposed to be an unopenable window open, he also had to replace the DT before today’s field trip.

William tapped for Jonas’s picture and profile. A hard-eyed boy stared back at him angrily. Twelve years old. Type six, passive/defiant. Something about the boy’s face seemed familiar, and William searched his personal attention records for the last six months, finding that five weeks ago he’d spent a few minutes trying to come up with an appropriate response to an awful short story the boy had written that involved, among other things, a legless cow cattle drive. Two months before that, William saw, he had tweaked the DT’s recommendation for medical treatment for what the boy’s doctor had called “willful attention deficit disorder.” Neither Biomeds or Chemmeds helped, and even the new attention/retention hormone enhancements made no difference. William thought, in the old days, before DT education, Jonas would have been labeled “learning disabled.” Now educators recognized that everyone was learning disabled in some form or another, and more than half the population received meds as part of the curriculum.

For Jonas, the meds were dropped and the DT had been reduced to situational learning prompts since the boy was ten, offering information whenever Jonas appeared interested in anything. As a result, the DT reported, Jonas showed interest less often and responded to the prompts less appropriately as time progressed.

William frowned. The boy should have been flagged months ago. Why not? He ran a quick diagnostic and found that the DT had labeled the boy as fitting the type six profile perfectly, and that his behavior was not outside of that learning style’s norm. Since Jonas’s Individual Education Plan, or I.E.P., corresponded to his progress, attitude and actions, there’d been no flag.

“Of course,” murmured William. “If the damned computer says he’s not learning anything, and he actually doesn’t learn anything, prediction matched the outcome and nothing must be wrong.” William arranged for a replacement DT to be ready for Jonas at the park entrance.

He called up the day’s progress monitor which showed him responding to each of his six-hundred students’ I.E.P.s. The DT, through six hundred v-Bills, simultaneously lectured, directed reading, contributed to a network panel discussion, asked questions, offered advice, emotionally counseled, annotated literature, praised achievement and motivated the underachievers.

Messages flicked by so fast, he couldn’t keep track of them.

The DT cleared; his earphone sounded an attention ping, then reminded him that the shuttle to the canyon and his awaiting field trip would be leaving in fifteen minutes. While he dressed, the phone continued to tell him facts about the geology lesson and to fill him in on the fifteen students he would be leading in this real-lesson. The only student who sounded even vaguely interesting was Jonas. “And he dropped his DT out the window,” said William to the empty room. “I’ve got to get out of teaching.”

On the hour long shuttle trip to the park, an elderly man sitting next to William drew him into a conversation, discovered he was a teacher, and before long, with the gentle whoosh of tires on the road as a backdrop, the man was rhapsodizing about school when he was a child. Filling the rest of the seats, other travelers swayed with the shuttle’s motion. Some stared blankly out the windows; some leaned over their DTs, keying in information or studying their displays. Gray privacy shields hid the occupants of some seats.

“Loved my school,” the old man said with a tremulous voice. “Solid brick building. We used to wait outside until the bell rang. That’s when school began, with a bell. No bells nowadays. Not nearly.”

William nodded, watching cactus and patches of brown desert grass slip by. “School doesn’t really begin or end anymore,” said William. “Learning happens when the opportunity arises. Individualization is the key, so there’s no need for a structure to meet in.” He thought idly about querying the DT on the subject. He could call up pictures of old schools and the history of building based education if wanted.

“We had classes,” continued the old man. “I still meet with my graduating class every other year. We used to do it every five years, but we’re getting older, you know. No guarantee that we’ll all make jumps that big.” He laughed to himself. “Loved my teachers too. Not all of them, of course, but most of them. Overall, they did me good. Got some good grades. Got me my diploma.”

No grades any more, thought William, only descriptors of progress. No diplomas, only knowledge and performance profiles that changed from day to day. No classes, as in “The Class of 2045.” A student never graduated. “We’re life long learners now,” said William. This is the “party” line, he thought, and he couldn’t say it with any enthusiasm. His own “class,” all six hundred plus of them, ranged from eight years old to seventy-nine. Except for special occasions, like today’s field trip, they had no reason to meet each other, and very few of them had. Central Education matched students with teachers based on teaching and learning styles, so that his students were spread all over the globe.

The old man pointed at the DT. “Of course, with those you know a lot more about your students. I could hide out in the back of my class. Could pass notes, you know. Wasn’t a very efficient system, I guess.”

“Yes, I guess not,” said William, tapping the DT’s cover. “I’ve got all the information…” He paused. They crossed the state line into Utah. “… But I don’t know any of them.”

The old man sighed and sat back in his chair. William didn’t understand why he’d said that. Leslie’s retirement, he decided, had thrown him off stride.

“Well,” said the old man, “teaching’s still a tough job.”

After a while, the man went to sleep. William pulled a privacy shield down from the ceiling, cutting off sight and most of the sound from the shuttle, and called v-Bill. The work area shimmered for a second, then his own features focussed in the DT on his lap.

“Hi, William,” v-Bill said. He signaled to somebody off screen. William suspected that the v-Bill was married. V-Bill never said anything, but the gardenias on his desk that William would never have on his own, or the sense that he was interrupting a conversation to talk to William, hinted to some presence in the house other than v-Bill. William guessed that the DT added these touches to make the v-teacher seem happier and more content than William felt.

“How’s everything?” said v-Bill. “Been working hard?”

William didn’t answer, but studied his electronic double for a moment. His hair line had receded over the years, drawing a line higher and higher on his forehead. Not bald really. Definitely aged though. In v-Bill’s eyes, William could still see his own youth, a kind of sparkle, a liveliness as v-Bill waited for William to speak, as if v-Bill was expecting William to get a joke they shared, to join him in laughter. William wondered if he still looked like that, or if the face on the DT was totally counterfeit, false not only in content, but appearance too.

William said, “You’re not real, you know.”

“Oh,” said v-Bill, sounding disappointed. “So you’re in that state of mind again, huh?”

“If you were real, you wouldn’t always be so damn self confident.”

V-Bill leaned back in his chair and made a steeple of his hands in the middle of his chest, a gesture that William lately had felt looked patronizing, so he’d quit doing it. The DT hadn’t picked up the change in his behavior yet, but it wouldn’t be long before v-Bill quit doing it too.

“I have bad days just like anyone else,” said v-Bill. “We could talk about it if you’d like.” He appeared concerned, as if William’s aggressiveness puzzled and hurt him. What was weird, William realized, was that even though he knew that v-Bill was only a construct, a brilliantly concocted amalgam of his own personality, mannerisms and DT augmented expertise, he found he almost wanted to tell him what was wrong: that he wasn’t positive that he should be a teacher anymore, or if he had ever been a teacher. He caught himself feeling sorry he’d been rude.

Suddenly angry, and unsure of why he’d called him in the first place, William said, “I’m not in the mood for this kind of self gratification.” He cut the connection. Instantly his earphone squeaked and a warning flag flashed in the corner of the work area. William tapped it, and the DT reported his own interaction with v-Bill as problematic and needing his personal attention. William smiled. The DT couldn’t handle his conferences with himself, which was probably why Central Education frowned on teachers communicating with their alter egos.

The shuttle lurched, and William raised the privacy shield. They had entered the park and had begun the long, winding climb to the visitor’s center on the rim of a canyon.

Naturally, all his students recognized him when he met them in the main lobby. They gathered around, DTs tucked under their arms or in backpacks, to shake his hand.

“William, at last, we meet face to face,” one said. William’s earphone whispered the student’s name and a personal fact that he could use to establish rapport, and William greeted him as if they were old friends, which, as far as the student was concerned, they were. As the rest made their hellos, the earphone prompted him continuously. All the time he shook hands, though, commenting about each student’s progress or asking about their hobbies, William scanned the crowd looking for Jonas Wynn. Hundreds of people filled the lobby: his own class and others, but also what looked like a couple of retirement groups, families and foreign tourists, all waiting patiently for their chance to walk one of the many guided trips into the canyon. The logistics of running a national park must be staggering, thought William. But he didn’t see his reluctant learner.

Finally, just as the visitor center dispatching officer announced his class’ departure gate, William spotted Jonas. Smaller than his picture implied, and much, much more frail, the boy moved uncertainly toward their gate, making labored progress as he squeezed between other people in his way.

“Over here, Jonas,” William shouted. The boy scanned the crowd blankly for a second, then his eyes settled on William. Some emotion flickered across Jonas’ face, an unreadable grimace. He pushed past the last intervening groups to join the class just as their gate whooshed open and the visitor center tour program started in their earphones.

William turned and followed his class out the door under the “STAY ON THE TRAIL” sign. He’d done this tour several times before, so he knew that they had to move rather smartly to keep up with the park’s description of where they were. He wouldn’t speak to them as a group until the first “meditation” rest a half mile farther along the canyon rim, just before the trail wound down into the canyon itself.

The sudden brightness of the noon sun made him blink away tears as he walked on the cement path. He wiped his eyes. To their left, a sandstone talus slope spotted with juniper, rose to the road they’d arrived on. Beyond that, a pale bluff of soft-curved rock marked the horizon. To their right, on the other side of a guard rail, the canyon, a thousand feet deep and a mile wide gaped invitingly. A pair of canyon swifts swooped in the updrafts. A bird called, a lovely trill of notes that died hauntingly away on the last tone, but he couldn’t tell if it were virtual through his earphone or if a real bird had made it.

Jonas walked just in front of him, his thin shoulders tightly bunched under his shirt. His glance darted to each side, as if he were afraid someone would catch him looking, and twice he turned back over his shoulder and caught William’s eyes.

“Nice day for this, isn’t it?” offered William.

Jonas jumped, and said nothing.

At the first rest stop, William gathered the class and recited some Edward Abbey and Thoreau from memory. He didn’t need the earphone to prompt him on this, but he felt programmed just the same. Behind him, he knew, sunlight danced in the canyon, and his students were reacting to the real-lesson by contrasting it to the v-lessons. Later, they’d all ooh and ah about how much more profound their moment with nature had been compared to the vids from their DTs. This was experiential knowledge and fit exactly into each of their DT driven I.E.P.s.

But he didn’t feel as if he were learning anything. Not only did he feel that he was indistinguishable from any prerecorded presentation, but the canyon itself felt virtual. He saw what the park determined he should see. He heard what the park determined he should hear. The tour controlled all of it, and he felt no hint of exploration any more, no hope for discovery.

As he reached the end of the Thoreau piece, and their attentive faces were focussed on him, he noticed Jonas at the back of the class, looking down at his shoes, scuffing some sand on the trail back and forth, and he felt exactly the same feeling about Jonas that he felt about the park. Where’s my chance to teach him? he thought. What can I do that the charts and diagnostics haven’t already told me? I am, he thought, predigested. My path has been determined.

The class applauded when he reached the end with Thoreau’s words, “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.” But William mouthed the words emptily, and realized that like v-Bill, he too was all form and no content.

His earphone pinged, and the park program urged them to proceed down the trail into the canyon. There, it said, they could see the “sands of time cut away” and that they’d “pass through million of millions of years with each downward step.”

His class turned away obediently and filed onto the narrow stairway with its protective handrails. William watched them leave. I can give you nothing, he thought. He knew that for the next twenty minutes, their earphones would direct their attention to the rock formations, to the pinion pine that clung precariously to tiny outcroppings, to the vistas beyond, and when they reached the next rest stop, where he was supposed to speak again, that the DT would recognize he was not there and fill in with something appropriate. The class wouldn’t know that he was supposed to accompany them the whole way. They’d never miss him.

Jonas, the last student, vanished down the trail, and William remained, leaning against the cool sandstone rock he’d lectured to them from. Within a minute, he heard the footsteps of the next group coming down the path, so he climbed over the low restraining fence and hurried out of sight up the canyon rim.

Within fifty yards of where he’d left the path, his earphone chirped, and an official sounding voice warned him that he was violating park rules and must return to the marked trail. William pulled the earphone out and placed it on top of his DT. His hand seemed strangely empty without it; a breath of air cooled the sweat in his ear. Then he continued walking the rim.

He thought about Leslie Franklin. They’d talked every morning for the last forty-four years, but they’d never met. She’d married twice during the years. He’d attended the ceremonies electronically. He’d consoled her when the first marriage fell apart, and then when her second husband passed away. They exchanged gifts on Christmas and birthdays. They’d co-authored papers together. He wondered what she smelled like. He wondered what it would have been like to have touched her hair.

In places, the rock slope fell gradually down in a confusion of crevices and boulders. He could see the deep fall in the gaps between them. In other places, long tables of rock, broken sharply away told him where the edge was. Further up canyon, some of them protruded beyond the cliff wall, so if he stood at the precipice, he might actually be dozens of feet over the drop already, with nothing between him and a thousand foot plummet except the lip of stone that supported him. He walked as close to the edge as he could; at times letting the edge of his shoe overlap, not really paying attention, feeling no vertigo, but his right hand waved airily over the nothingness beyond.

He blinked slowly, still walking, so for two or three steps at a time, he couldn’t see where he was going, but the breeze brushed his face, and he felt an almost bat-like sense of where he was, as if he was flying on the edge, not walking. Sand scrunched. Branches creaked. Leaves rustled. Real air! Real sand! Contact! he thought, and he pictured a stride into wind, into real stone.

William stopped and faced the canyon. He closed his eyes. Sunlight pressed warmly on his face. Stone rested solidly beneath his heels, and he could feel the naked pull of the canyon in his chest. He let the breeze sway him back and forth. This is good, he thought. This is real and proper. Tears rolled off his cheeks, but he didn’t feel sad right now, he felt better than he’d been all day.

After a while, feeling very centered, a long, long reach away from his class and the DTs and forty-four years of teaching, he looked where he faced. A dozen feet away, balanced on an updraft and as still as the rocks around him, a raven floated in the air. William stared back. Nothing moved, and for a spooky, surreal second, William thought that he’d slipped out of time; the world had stopped and he was the ghost in the eternal and unchanging now. Then the raven cocked its head from one side to the other seeming to examine him with shiny, black glass eyes.

Then it dropped a wing and glided swiftly away.

Leslie had said that she didn’t want to learn anything that she couldn’t learn by being there. And he wondered if she had meant by that that she wanted to learn the things that couldn’t be tested, measured or described. How do you evaluate seeing the raven? How do you teach it?

The tears began to dry on his cheeks, pulling at the skin, and he realized where he stood, toes suspended over the rocks far below. He stepped back.

“You’re not supposed to be there, are you?” a voice asked.

William didn’t turn immediately. He tried to hold onto the feeling that possessed him, but the immediacy of the question drove it back. Not completely. He could still sense it, a tinge of connection. Real world. Real lessons. Real learning.

He turned. Jonas stood beside a clump of sage, his serious face inscrutable. “This is off limits,” he said.

William sighed and pressed his hands into the small of his back. The muscles there ached suddenly, and it took a concentrated effort to make them relax.

“You’re not supposed to be here either,” said William.

“I know. What were you doing?”

In the canyon, William saw the raven, now just a black dot sliding along a cliff wall. “Well,” he said, “I’m not sure.” He thought about all the things he could say to the boy, all the things the DT had told him about learning style and modes of instruction, and he decided just to answer the question. “I think I was thinking about who I am.”

“Really?” said Jonas. He approached the edge and sat down, his feet dangling over the precipice. “What did you learn?”

“I don’t know yet.”

Jonas seemed to absorb that for a moment. The floor of the canyon spread out beneath their feet. William let his heels bounce off the unyeilding wall. In DT conferences, William always answered questions quickly, or formulated advice for his students even as the student spoke so there would be no wasted time, but here, with Jonas on the edge of a cliff, he didn’t want to speak. He had nothing to say.

Finally, as if to fill the silence, Jonas said, “Did you see that crow?”

“Crows have fan shaped tails.” William scrunched his fingertips against the rock. Gritty bits rolled beneath them, and he knew that if he sat there forever and kept rubbing his fingers back and forth in the same spot, he’d eventually wear away grooves in the stone. He would leave a mark. “That bird’s tail was like a wedge. It was a raven.”

“Oh,” said Jonas. “I didn’t know.”

They talked for a half hour more. Cloud shadows moved across the floor of the canyon. Swifts dove by, cutting the air with abrupt rips. William’s legs grew cold against the stone, but he felt no urge to move.

Finally, an angry voice called from behind them, “Hey! You two are way out of bounds. What do you think you’re up to?” It was a park ranger.

Jonas said, “This is my teacher. He was teaching me something.”

William nodded.




WORKING THE MOON CIRCUIT


The problem with running full reality skin shell rentals is that everyone wants to try the vices. You’d think with so many other ways to get the experience of visiting remote archeological sites that booting into a rental wouldn’t hold much attraction, but there are kinds for every kind, as they say, so we keep a stock of fully functioning skin shells. It’s supposed to make the experience more “authentic,” whatever that means, but the real draw, as I said, is the vice.

As one of the curators, I’m booted into a shell semi-permanently, of course. Hands, face, feet, hair, teeth: the whole package. When I’m not interpreting the data the ancients left behind, I run tours and help customers orient themselves to the new equipment. Bipedal locomotion, for example, takes some time to master, and binocular vision with the eyes on top of the organism can also be confusing. Why the feet have to be so far from the sensing organs is beyond me, but that’s the way this species worked. No wonder there aren’t any of them around any more.

So, I took the first tour of the day down to the observation deck. What I wanted were questions about how the ancients who left their mark on the airless surface traveled, how they achieved so much in metallurgy and physics without the benefit of groupmeld or infinitely researchable infoquarries. What I wanted were questions about their thinking, about their spirits, and if I thought remnants of the dead lingered, but tourists never asked interesting questions. They came to see the remnants and to abuse the skin shells, and then they left. None of them stayed long enough to learn who I was, and I didn’t care about them. It’s lonely work.

These ancients were first tier primitives, discovering everything on their own, scrambling out of an impressive gravity well in canisters designed to carry the conditions their unmalleable bodies could tolerate. A truly impressive achievement, and although they have long since disappeared, they left footprints in the dust, and their machines mark the possibilities of persistent sentience.

Instead, the dilettantes spent a desultory hour touching each other, stumbling into walls, mangling the language, and occasionally shrieking just to see how much volume the vocal chords could manage. Hard to believe these were the masters of the universe. One, though, a dark-haired woman who had been coming to the lectures for weeks, hearing the same presentations over and over, stood almost comatose on the edge. As always, she caught my attention with stillness. The first time I saw her, I thought that the port hadn’t taken and the body was unoccupied, but she had moved away from a loud man who pulled at his lip, then laughed when it slapped against his teeth.

Ignoring tourist boorishness is easy, though. Except for the dark-haired woman who evidently had decided to be a permanent resident, they come and go. The gallery remains, like the footprints themselves.

I like the set up. In the morning, the perfectly clear floor hangs an inch above the airless surface, exactly duplicating the impressions in the dust, so the customers can study the several million-year old footprints up close. A couple hours later, the observation area is drawn thirty feet up to give a panorama. The ancient landing vessel rests on its four feet, surrounded by the detritus of the expedition. I explain what each piece is for customers who want the full experience of wearing the skin shells. Instead of shooting the info straight into their storage centers, I tell how the main ship they see is just a landing stage, that the primitive explorers detached a second vessel to blast their way back to a meeting with orbiting transport, where the explorers abandoned the second ship to go home.

This took some explaining, and most of the tourists would port the facts later, once they figured out that “listening” to information, and then trying to process the audible signals was an incredibly tedious way to learn anything.

But they wanted the experience. At least that’s what they said.

The vices, though, caught most of their attention. Some drugs, for example, altered the shell’s perceptions in interesting ways. Eating, for others, entertained them for hours, particularly spicy foods or sweets. Part of my job involved purging the skin shells of the unnecessary calories and then exercising them remotely to maintain muscle tone after the tenants evacuated. And, naturally, most of the tourists grew interested in sexual possibilities. Since I had been wearing my skin shell for several years, and had become comfortable in it, tourists often approached me for help.

One of the women shells caught me after the morning tour, a red-haired model, a bit shorter than me. I had, while becoming acquainted with my skin shell in the first months, experimented with its sexual possibilities quite often. This red-haired one hadn’t been a favorite. They all feel slightly different, although, who is animating the skin is more interesting than the skin itself. As stimulating as sex in these shells can be, the personality interaction makes the encounter.

Red Hair said, “I’m only here for a few days, and the rest of my tour group is clumsy in this form, but I hear that procreation activities can be quite pleasant if you’re with someone who knows what they are doing. I have an hour before the next presentation. Would you mind helping?”

See what I mean?

I begged off without explaining to her that if she wanted real authenticity in her skin shell that she should wear the clothes we provided instead of running around the center naked.

After I’d given the second tour of the day, the overview, where I talked to the group about human explorations, and the short, sad history of their species, I went to the observation deck alone. All we had for information about the old explorers came from their space probes and the scattering of landing sites we’d found on what had been their home planet’s moon, but we were able to extract quite a bit about them, including their genetic information that we used to create the shells. Of course, it helped that they were aware enough of space’s preserving qualities to include information about themselves in their probes, but we also could deduce quite a bit by their tracks. They’re eagerness to send records about themselves into the unknown puzzled me for a long time. No other long-dead species whose remnants litter the surface of airless orbs attached plaques or audio records or visual images of themselves. It’s almost as if they knew they couldn’t last. The urgency that pushed them to explore also cut them short. Their energy turned in, turned on them, ending their brief history before it properly started.

The supporting frame for the center gave us flexibility. Two beautiful arches crossed above the landing site from which the viewing deck dangled, allowing me to position the observatory wherever I liked. I moved to the spot directly over the landing craft. With the sun near the horizon, the ancient mess of footprints around the craft stood in sharp relief. Every part of their expedition was written in the dust. We had reconstructed their entire stay: which footprints were first, which explorer made each print, where they went and what they uncovered. They didn’t wander far and they missed more than they found. Evidently they hoped to discover water on their moon, but they went around one of the many craters with ice at the bottom. From where I stood, I could see a line of tracks that bypassed the site. They wondered if they were alone in the universe, but, improbably enough, they just missed finding a mining facility that a much older space-faring species had left, invisible from above, but obvious from the surface. The ridge that hid the evidence from them cast its long shadow almost to the lander’s feet.

A voice startled me.

“Do you think,” said the dark-haired tourist who I thought was inanimate earlier, “that their civilization was doomed because they lived on a double planet?” I hadn’t heard her come into the room. She had never spoken before.

Like many of the tourists, she didn’t wear shoes. Many of them say they want an authentic experience, but they won’t play the part. Her hands were clasped behind her back as she studied the lander below. “I mean, what other species grew up with a monstrosity of a moon like this in their sky? Do you think they felt how it tugged them around?”

She didn’t look at me as she waited for an answer.

“They wouldn’t sense the gravity. It would just be a part of what they knew.” I wondered why she had been silent for so long and why she decided to speak now.

“But it would be huge in their sky. Look at the planet itself.” She glanced up. The home world, its features obscured by the opaque atmosphere, half in the sun and half dark, hovered above. “When they lived on the surface, the air was clear, you said. Wouldn’t they see the moon? Wouldn’t they fear that it would crush them?”

“The moon wouldn’t be as large to them as the planet is to us, but it’s true they would see it. Maybe having a goal so visible drew them into space. It might have caused them to develop technologies before they could handle them.”

She let her gaze wander across the landscape. As I said, the personality behind the shell was more interesting than the shell. Whoever animated this one had layers. “I would be afraid. As I slept, I would feel the moon, bigger than anything in the night. It would be bright, wouldn’t it, like another sun?”

“Maybe, I don’t know. I haven’t seen the moon from a distance.”

She sat on the floor so that she could see the landing site between her spread legs, a surprisingly graceful move for a tourist, but then I remembered she’d had weeks more practice than the rest of them. In fact, after me, she would be the most experienced person at the observatory in her skin shell. She pressed her hands against the smooth surface. “Were they a species that made myths? Did they have explanations for their moon, before they began exploring space, I mean? Many species worshipped their sun when they were young. Maybe they worshipped their sun and their moon, or maybe some of them believed in the god of one but not the other. There could have been wars. What if they came to the moon because they hoped to find a god, and when they didn’t they had no reason to live?”

I wanted suddenly to sit beside her. My normal presentation didn’t cover this material. They were the questions I thought about. “We know some about them, but not what you are asking. The artifacts don’t tell us everything.”

Two more tourists came into the room, two of the male shells. One held the other’s arm. “We were experimenting with durability,” said the first, supporting the weight of the other’s arm in his hands.

“The digits break,” said the second. “And they hurt! It still hurts! Must be a flaw in the design. If the system is damaged, you should get the signal and then be able to turn it off. I’m very uncomfortable!”

“He’s never had an endoskeleton. I told him the little things could snap, but he put them in the door anyway,” said the first one apologetically.

Two of the man’s fingers were bent backwards unnaturally. The knuckles were swollen and purple.

I thought that I was lucky he hadn’t destroyed the shell entirely. On the last tour, a tourist entered an airlock without protection and opened it. When I talked to the angry guest remotely an hour later to explain that he’d lost his damage deposit, he complained that he shouldn’t be responsible for a unit too fragile for a change in environmental conditions. He also complained about the pain. “I was so distracted that I almost stayed with it until it expired. I’ll have to have the experience wiped. Very traumatic,” he said bitterly.

I said to the man with the broken fingers, “We can load you into an undamaged shell.”

“Good,” he said. “I’m going to try the other gender. I understand the experience is different.”

They left, headed for the decanter center where he would transfer his consciousness to an empty shell.

The woman on the floor laughed, an utterance tourists didn’t handle well. “I talked to him earlier. He was mad because they wouldn’t rent him two shells at the same time so he could have sex with himself. I’ll bet he didn’t break his fingers in a door.”

I shook my head, a gesture I’d seen in one of the historical records. I realized she wouldn’t know what it meant. “What a waste. You’d think he could get whatever weird simulated interactions with himself he wanted, without renting real shells.”

She leaned forward, almost folding herself in half on the floor. “I can always tell when it’s a simulation.”

Thirty feet below, every pebble cast a long shadow. Shadows filled the footprints too, shallow as they were. She was right. If this were a simulation, I’d feel the falseness of the information. My senses would bump against the experience. Tech folks called it “perceptional dissonance,” the distance between what the simulation is feeding to your consciousness and what your sensory organs are not telling you. Most beings don’t notice the dissonance, or they don’t care, but, for purists, the real experience is worth the tiny improvement.

“I was here yesterday, before the tour.” She pressed the side of her face against the floor. It would be cool and smooth. “I thought I saw something move next to the lander. That’s why I decided to talk to you.”

My skin prickled, a reaction I’d never felt in this body. “What do you mean?”

“I thought I saw someone in a space suit. Its head was encased. The image only lasted a second.” She sat up, then stood, running her hands up and down her arms. “These shells send so much information. When I touch myself, why do I feel it both with my hand and my skin? It’s redundant. I took a shower my first day; I thought I would fall unconscious with the overload. There were so many sensations, touch, taste, feel, sound, sight. How could these creatures think with their bodies signaling them about everything?”

I’d forgotten what my training days in the shell had been like. Most of the tourists reveled in the sensations—not that these bodies were the most sensitive in the universe. Few rivaled them though.

“Sleep scares me,” she said, “even when I’m tired. In sleep, the shell sends me signals. Strange images. Emotions.”

“Dreams.”

“I know. The orientation mentioned them, but experiencing them is different.”

I wondered if it was possible that she was new to body porting. Veteran tourists didn’t comment on this level of being in the shells, and veterans wouldn’t stay in the same shell for an extended period. Other shells provided as many or more variations, although none of them combined them like these did. “If you go back to your room, I can send you a drug that will tone down the sensory system. You can build to full engagement gradually.”

“No, I’m getting used to it. I do think I’ll go to my room to rest, though. Turning down the light and shutting away sounds helps. They even have a sense of smell! What a vivid world these creatures lived in.”

I nodded. Most tourists noticed the shell’s limitations. No overmeld capabilities. No tie to universal data. Faulty memory. Odd mental connectivity issues that sometimes strung thoughts together in a peculiar fashion. Physiologically induced emotions. Dreams.

“I have more questions, if you have a moment.” She looked at me for the first time. “But I’m tired. Could you come to my room?”

Normally I would say no. This could be another blatant foray into sex.

I surprised myself. “Yes, if I have time.”

When she left, I moved the observatory back to the surface level. The floor reshaped itself to take on the terrain’s contours, wrapping around the artifacts so they could be inspected up close without actually touching them. I knelt at the lander’s feet to reexamine the ancient explorers’ markings on the ground. Nothing had changed. Whatever the dark-haired woman had seen was in her imagination, but I’d seen movement too on the airless surface once, from the corner of my eye, when I glanced away, for an instant, the flag that stood next to the lander shifted as if a hand was placing it there. The impression was so strong that I checked the playback. I saw my own reaction to the movement—I flinched—but the flag hadn’t moved. Another time I saw a figure.

Some of the information they’d included on their probes mentioned religion. Clearly they believed in an afterlife. As desperately as they flung their machines into the sky (the period where they could escape their planet was vanishingly short), I wondered if they were trying to reach their heaven. Maybe the dark-haired tourist was right about them.

I stood nearly on the dust, in an alien shell, surrounded by warm and nourishing air on the surface of an airless moon. Every seam, every curve in the metal, each crease in the crumpled foil they used to protect the vessel stood in sharp detail in the setting sun. I put my hand on the form-fitting floor that wrapped the lander, only an inch from the actual artifact. What had these beings hoped to find so far from home? Had they been satisfied to reach this inhospitable place?

I put my foot over one of the creased impressions left in the dust, and then stepped into each print for twenty paces so that I retraced the path one explorer took so long ago.

Nothing appeared. No suited figure. I remember the one I saw, its features hidden behind a metallic sheen of faceplate. It had hopped and skipped from the lander to a small solar array, and then vanished. Like the apparition the dark-haired woman had seen, it left no tracks. It might have retraced old footsteps too, as I just did.

A leg that supported our resort stood in the distance, cutting a shadow across the sun. Above me, the bulk of the guest rooms and the rest of the facility blocked the starry sky.

Without making a decision, I found myself at the dark-haired woman’s room. She didn’t speak when she let me in.

“You said you had questions.” I sat on the edge of her bed. The room had no other furniture. Part of a loaf of bread rested on the shelf by the door. We had no idea what the ancients’ food actually tasted like, but we had pictures, descriptions and a good sense of what the shells needed to maintain strength and health. All part of the experience.

She sat next to me. Most tourists don’t wash the shells often enough, and their bodies take on a stench. She smelled of the shower’s cleansing solutions. “Have you done this long?”

“Here?” I said. “Several years. The research is interesting.”

“And none of them are left? They never escaped this sun?”

“There’s no evidence they did. Their planet is tectonically active. All remnants of them and what happened to them has long since been buried. The atmosphere isn’t even the same.”

She turned to me, put her fingers on my arm and squeezed. “They did so much with so little.”

I shrugged, another gesture she wouldn’t understand. “Species come and go. For all I know, the species of my original shell is gone too.”

“You’re very old, aren’t you?”

It was an unexpected question, but how she said it revealed her. “You’re not,” I stated.

“I’m a reconstitute. Who I was broke down—the data corrupted—they said. Sometimes it happens, and out of what was left they made me.”

“How long ago?”

“Twenty years, conscious. There have been several rebuild sessions over time, and they stored me for a while.”

“I’ve never met someone who was young.”

“There’s a lot to see.” I realized she meant there was a lot for her to see, not that there was a lot to see of her.

She turned her back to me. “My skin is irritated. Can you scratch it?” She pulled her shirt off. “Be gentle. It’s all too intense.”

I brushed my fingernails lightly over her back at the shoulder blades.

“Lower, please.”

When I hit the spot she tensed and made a non-speaking sound.

“Is that better?”

“Yes, but please don’t stop.”

I traced circles and zig zags on her skin from the tops of her shoulders to her lower back, redoing the patterns again and again, gradually increasing the pressure. Soon her skin reddened, and I switched from scratching to kneading the muscles.

“That’s good. Can we switch places?”

I nodded. “Yes.” Was she interested in trying the sexual possibilities after all? If so, I had never seen this slower approach. The idea didn’t seem as repellent as it had earlier. I couldn’t tell if my change of attitude was mine or the shell’s, whose physical response showed her attentions had provoked it.

“Can you take your shirt off too?”

She mimicked the actions I’d done to her, barely touching my skin as she circled my shoulder blades or paralleled my backbone from neck to waist. I’d ignored the shell’s possibilities for a long time. It’s true that you can get used to anything, but as I sat on her bed, no longer thinking about shepherding tourists or the difficulties of putting together a coherent story about an eons dead civilization, I became aware again of the shell’s sensory powers. Beside her clean scent, I smelled the bread on the shelf, and the slight chemical tinge that was in the observatory’s air, always. The pervasive but dim light emanating from the walls killed shadows, a welcome change from the starkness of the light on the moon’s surface. My hands rested on my thighs in the soft light. I thought about the oddness of my fingers’ design, but also the cleverness of how they could manipulate tools, their adaptability. And I could hear her breathing, and the sound she made when she shifted behind me, even the whisper her fingernails made against my skin.

Mostly I felt.

I’ve had sex in these shells, and there’s much to recommend the experience, but the action is short, short compared to what the dark-haired woman was doing to my back. She leaned forward, placed her forearms on me, rubbing the skin with her skin, pressing against the muscles, sending signals to me of movement, friction, pressure and warmth.

I made a sound like the one she’d made earlier. For the moment, my universe closed to become focused and small.

The ancients truly were primitives to have so many senses tuned so high. Their lives must have been dangerous and brutal. Why have sensitive spots on their backs, which they would never feel something with, unless they were constantly expecting danger? But if the sense of touch everywhere was to preserve them, why did being touched there feel so good?

I moaned again.

“I can’t groupmeld,” she said. Her hands stopped.

“How is that possible?”

“Limitations in the adaptability of my reconstruct, evidently. I don’t miss it, really. I’ve never known what it is like.” She scratched the small of my back with short, gentle motions. “I thought you might like to know in case you wanted to find me there.”

Her touch floated from spot to spot. My entire back tingled from her ministrations. I said, “I haven’t done a groupmeld for a long time, but it’s a comfort to know I can when I’m ready,” which wasn’t true. I hadn’t integrated my consciousness with the infoquarry since I’d taken over this skin shell, and I didn’t want to. It was the tourists, I think, mistreating the shells, ignoring the import of the artifacts, bumping against anything that would bump back while they were here. They could be in the groupmeld too, adding or taking what they wanted from everyone else. Plus, a groupmeld disoriented me, made me lose a bit of self, at least for a while. Many of the friends I’d had long ago went in and never came out, joining the overmind. The last time I’d melded, I’d sensed for an instant a friend’s familiar thought, like a ghost, but it flittered away, and I couldn’t find it again.

She said, “Sometimes when I get to know someone, they ask to meet me in the groupmeld. I just wanted you to know I couldn’t. I only know what I know, and nothing else, and you can never know me.”

I thought about the lander sitting on the lunar surface and the tracks around it. The ancients left evidence, but I could not talk to them. Being in their bodies wasn’t the same as the groupmeld. I’d never know them either.

She kissed my back, her breath hot and moist. “The skin has a taste,” she said.

I stood. “There are other visitors I should attend to. Will you be at the afternoon session? We’ll do a discussion of the ethics of archeological tourism.”

“I know. I’ve heard it before. Can you come back later?” She sat on the bed with her legs crossed, her shirt on the floor, her face turned toward me, a visual echo of the extinct who’d been here before.

“I have many duties.”

Back on the observation deck, the changeless tableau waited. Since the moon revolved very slowly in relation to the sun, the shadows were nearly the same as when I’d left. I accessed the recordings from the last couple of days, examining them closely for the dark-haired woman. She had come to the deck alone yesterday. The image of her walking slowly to the center of the room captured her grace. Truly, she moved like she’d been born in the shell and not recently taken it on. She stopped, dropped to her knees, stared at the lander as if she’d seen something surprising then shook her head and rubbed her eyes. The recording captured nothing on the Moon’s surface, though. The moon and abandoned equipment were the same as they had been for millions of years. Either her apparition was imagination, or it couldn’t be recorded with our instruments.

She didn’t come to the late presentation. The tourists listened as well as any group of them ever did, which meant barely at all. A few in the front of the group looked attentive, but the rest giggled and coughed and touched themselves during my chat. I suppose if they extended their stay, the skin shell’s novelty would wear off. The red-head who had propositioned me earlier was there, wearing clothes this time, but the pants were on backwards and unzipped. A woman next to her kept mumbling in her ear while I talked, and I realized it was the body we’d given the tourist who’d broken his fingers.

The deck was close to the ground again, so the lander stood taller than my head, as did the flag. I liked this time of day best, when the observatory didn’t cast a shadow on the artifacts. The group stood to the side so we didn’t put our shadows on the lander either.

“We have catalogued the numerous sites for your perusal, including site 423 with the dead explorers in the capsule. If you have signed up for the transport option, a shuttle will take you physically to our observatory there, or you may prefer to transfer directly into their flesh units. I suggest you take the real-time journey, though. We have replicated several of their vessels to give you a more authentic recreation of their technology. You will pass over numerous interesting and historical points on the way.”

As I talked, the dark-haired girl joined the group. At the same time, a figure moved in the background, beyond the observatory’s confines. Startled, I kept the presentation going. I’d spoken it so many times before that the speech required no attention on my part.

A bulky figure shuffled toward one of the experiments, kicking up dust that spayed straight away from its feet and fell in perfect parabolas. The equipment on its back made it top heavy, and looked as if it might tip it over at any point. The suit was white with dark gloves. Tubes dangled from the front, feeding into the huge pack on its back, and on its shoulder was a patch that matched the pattern of the flag by the lander.

The dark-haired woman followed my gaze so that she saw the apparition too. Two of the tourists looked behind them, and then chatted with each other. They had seen nothing. Only the dark-haired woman and myself could see the vision.

“It’s just litter,” said the red-haired woman. The woman next to her, who had now wrapped her arm around her waist, said, “They were children, weren’t they? They never escaped their sun. Their consciousnesses were shipwrecked within them.”

The spacesuited figure straightened from its task and gazed at the planet overhead. I tried to imagine what their home looked like when the atmosphere was clear and they could see all the way to the surface. There must have been visible bodies of water. Analysis indicated over half the planet may have been covered, and there could have been water vapor clouds too. What did it look like when their sun caught the water and reflected back like a jewel on fire?

For the longest time, the figure in the spacesuit looked up without moving, and then it vanished. The dark-haired woman was crying. Although the ancient records mentioned physical manifestations of emotions, I’d never seen a skin shell cry.

“We’re having a going away party in the cafeteria,” said the red-haired woman. “The shells are alcohol sensitive.”

I waited until the tourists had left. The dark-haired woman stayed behind too.

She came close to where I stood, next to the lander. “Do you think we made the skin shells so well that we can see the spirits of their dead? Are we seeing ghosts?”

“I don’t know. Maybe. They were a strange people who started a long trip they couldn’t finish.”

From my point of view, I could see most of the footprints they’d left, the scattering of equipment and tools, the lone flag duplicating the patch on the suited figure’s arm, but beyond the jumble of marks in the dust, the Moon’s surface was trackless. They’d only begun. They didn’t have groupmeld or the infoquarry. They couldn’t know any experience other than their own, each one of them, alone in themselves, working together to get so far.

The Moon’s gray surface was sobering and hopeful. Much could be accomplished by the isolated working together.

“How long will you stay?” I asked.

“If you don’t mind, a long time, I think.”

I took a deep breath. Even breathing produced sensations in the ancients’ shape. “I don’t mind.”

“I have to decide what to do with my life.”

Her voice sounded like it had come to belong to her. Unlike the tourists, she wasn’t borrowing it anymore. She was becoming herself in this shell, and I would never know more about her than she could share through the imperfections of speech and the limited (but intense!) senses of the skin shells.

And that seemed enough.




PLANT LIFE


Jermaine said, “Just being around growing young women makes me feel alive.” He poked a finger into the cement planter’s black dirt. “That’s where the excitement is, Bucko, and these are nearly ready to harvest.”

Gregory looked down the long aisle through the middle of the greenhouse where rows of heavy trunked plants like the one they stood next to grew from solid, gray planters. From the top of each plant, four branches sprouted and bowed with the weight of their fruit, full sized women.

They walked to the next plant and Jermaine picked a handful of dirt out of it, felt it like an expert farmer and then let it dribble back. Even though the planter was only three feet tall, Jermaine had to reach up to replace the dirt. He was very short, almost a midget. A moody man who Gregory didn’t particularly like, he had insisted they come to the flower shop when he overheard Gregory arguing with his newly “ex” girlfriend on the phone.

Jermaine said, “I hear that their secret here is meticulous care. Each gene splicing, forced mutation and pollenization is done by hand.”

“I’m not sure I’m ready… I mean… a plant… I want to live alone,” said Gregory.

“Not just a ‘plant.’ A designer house plant, a state of the art product! And don’t give me this stuff about living alone, Bucko. Unless you think house plants think, you’ll still be on your own. That’s the beauty of it.”

Gregory turned away from Jermaine and faced the next “fruit” dangling from an acorn like skull cap that cupped the top half of her head. Green streaks showed faintly through her pale skin, through her eyelids.

“This one’s almost ripe.” Despite his three piece suit, Jermaine clambered onto the planter, grasped the “girl’s” wrist and examined the hand, turning it palm up. “See, fingers separated.” He pressed his thumb into the palm and the fingers closed slowly around it. “Stimulus reflexes coming along.” He beckoned Gregory, “Here, touch its skin.”

Shaking his head, Gregory backed away.

“Relax, Bucko, it’s meant to be handled. That’s what it’s here for.”

“I’m uncomfortable.” Gregory’s face flushed. “She’s naked.”

“Come on.” Jermaine held out a hand. “It’s all right.”

As if afraid that someone observed his reluctance, Gregory glanced side to side then stepped up next to Jermaine.

“You said they were ‘fully functioning?’”

“Fully reflexive. Press here.” Jermaine directed Gregory’s hand to the small of the woman’s back; he reached around her tentatively but jerked his hand away when he touched her.

“She’s warm!”

“Of course. Would you want a cold one? Hold that spot longer. Don’t move your hand.”

Gregory touched her again. For a few seconds the three of them stood still; fans at the far end of the greenhouse blew humid air past them, ruffling Gregory’s hair, partially uncovering a bald spot. Then the plant moved. Her hips pushed against him rhythmically, and her arms moved up as if to encircle him. He stepped away. The woman’s arms dropped and her torso quit moving.

“Oh, my,” he exclaimed.

“That reflex will improve, naturally, when she’s completely ripe, about a week after she’s picked.”

“Are there other… uh… models?”

“Sure. Each trunk produces three slightly different usable fruits, like sisters, but the separate plants… well, you can see.” Jermaine gestured to the next planter where “girls” distinctly different from the one they were standing next to hung: more delicate, shorter. Gregory tried not to stare. He looked away.

“You said there were three ‘fruits’ per plant, but I count four.” Gregory pointed to a fourth girl dangling in the shadow behind the trunk.

“Ah, you mean Rose.” Jermaine sidled around the plant between the trunk and the girls. “They’re a recessive gene, I understand. Quite unusable.”

Gregory hopped off the planter and went around to where Jermaine was standing. His hand sunk into the wet dirt when he braced himself. Little globs of soil flew from his fingers as he shook them, and he held his hand away from his suit until Jermaine tossed him a rag to wipe it off.

Relieved to be doing something mundane, something as unembarrassing as cleaning his hands, Gregory wiped each finger meticulously. When he finished he looked at “Rose” and gasped.

“Quite striking, isn’t she?”

Like the others, her toes brushed the dirt as she swayed slightly from her branch. Her hands rested against her thighs, relaxed, fingers curved as if waiting for someone to hold them, but no one would hold these hands, Gregory realized, no one would embrace this “fruit,” because huge thorns, hard, wicked and sharp poked through her skin at every point. She bristled with inch long stickers so heavily that she didn’t even mimic human appearance as the others did. From her forehead, her cheeks and lips, her neck and shoulders; from her breasts and belly, her hips and thighs, they curved out, translucent at the tips, needle sharp and glistening.

Gregory reached out to touch a thorn on her leg.

“Better not, Bucko. She’s fully reflexive too.” Jermaine lightly brushed the thorns on her belly, then pulled his hand away as her hips thrust forward. “You could get a nasty little cut from this one.” He laughed. “She got me and I knew it was coming.” He put the heel of his hand in his mouth.

“It’s hideous.”

“I don’t know. Depends on how you look at her.”

Gregory shuddered. “Why do they grow anything like this?”

“Like I said, a recessive gene. Completely unavoidable. Sometimes they sell one for novelty.” Jermaine climbed off the planter. “Let’s look at some of the others.”

A half hour later, Gregory chose a “girl” that he liked and signed the contract for delivery. He felt, absurdly, like he had as a child after buying a Christmas tree.

The next day, at home, Gregory waited for the delivery. He was watering an African Violet, letting the water’s weight push the leaves into the black earth, until the pot overflowed. He tapped the leave’s edges to shake the drops off, then rubbed the soft fuzz on the leaf as if the plant were a mouse. The violets were Sara’s, his “ex.” He had expected her to pick them up after she left, but as the days passed and the leaves began to droop and shrivel, he had watered them. “You have to talk to them,” she’s said when she’d bought them. “Talk and TLC and they’ll bloom.” She’d say, “Here’s water for my ducks. How are my babies?” That’s ridiculous, he had thought at the time.

Pots of African Violets covered the entire counter top. She’d replaced the florescent bulb over the counter with a grow light, and as each plant flourished, she’d pinched and pruned, divided and replanted, until not a patch of the mauve linoleum counter was visible. Gregory refilled the canister and, without talking, doused the next plant.

She had loved simple things: plants, horses, sad movies, sappy poetry. For a big woman—a hint of double chin, padded shoulders and cushioned collar bones, round soft hips, broad thighs, pliant skin—she had moved over the tiny plants with a delicate grace. “Water, water everywhere and here’s a drop to drink.”

Finished with the violets, Gregory checked his watch, opened the front door and looked up and down the long, empty street, sat in front of the TV, staring at the blank screen. A car hummed past the house and he half got up but sat again when it didn’t stop. Finally he searched his collection of DVDs for something to watch until the delivery. He paused at The King and I, a movie that Sara had watched over and over. He had found her slumped into the recliner one morning the week before she’d left, the remote control in hand, crying during a dance sequence. “Why?” he’d said. “Because they love each other,” she’d replied.

He pushed Little Shop of Horrors into the player and fast forwarded to the climax. (“Feed me, Seymour! Feed me!”)

He fell asleep before it ended and dreamed about Sara. He held out his hand to her, but when she took it she screamed. His palm was filled with thorns. He woke up, biting his lip.

The delivery man was scrawny and short. Gregory thought he could be a jockey if he got out of the delivery business. The heavy, blue plastic crate, like a huge Smurf coffin, stood on end in the living room. The delivery man unsnapped the buckles that held the lid closed, but he didn’t open it. “You got instructions, right?” he said. Before Gregory could answer, he continued, “Keep it out of the sun. Otherwise you’ll get sprouts. Wet its skin once a day. Otherwise you’ll get cracks. A damp sponge’ll do the trick. Unpadded manacles, whips, vibrators or anything sharp will bruise or break the skin, which will void your warranty. Keep it out of direct breezes, like a fan, air conditioner or heating duct. Store it in the carrying case when you’re not using it.” He paused to consult a card he held. Gregory felt like he was having his Miranda Rights read to him. “A diluted alcohol wipe will kill bug infestations. Forcing the limbs beyond normal range will void the warranty. So will the use of oil-based paints, electrical devices or abrasives, like sandpaper or nail files.”

“Sandpaper?”

The man sighed. “The stories I could tell.” He looked at the card again. “The case is heated, so plug it in and it’ll stay at body temperature. The plant will hold heat for several hours. Sort of like a waterbed.” He laughed then grabbed a pair of recessed handles in the lid and pulled it open. “Of course, it’s a little green. Newly picked this morning. A couple of days, the color should be fine.”

“She’s wearing a robe.” Gregory’s voice squeaked.

“Part of the service. You can keep it. Most people don’t. We’ll be by in two weeks with a fresh plant.”

“Two weeks?”

“Two weeks, three weeks, depends on the weather, they get soft. Like an old tomato. It’s in your contract. Didn’t you read it?”

Gregory had thrown the papers in his desk without looking at them. “Yes, I’m sorry. Slipped my mind.”

The delivery man shut the case, looked Gregory over sagely. “Your first one, right? Nothing to it. Read the instructions. Just like when you were a kid with a model airplane.”

The delivery man was in the truck and halfway down the street before Gregory realized what he meant.

During dinner, he felt the presence of the coffin-sized case in his bedroom where he had moved it, but he made himself eat slowly. Sara used to complain that he chewed his food twice as much as he needed to. She’d smiled and said, “Gregory, you’re like a cow.” But she stayed at the table until they were done, and on the nights they made love, they did it right after dinner.

After he cleaned the dishes and put the leftovers away, he stood in front of the case in his bedroom with the lights out a long time. When he finally opened it, the smell of grass wafted out, pasture grass after a rain.

She was, as Jermaine promised, fully reflexive.

Gregory met Jermaine the next night at a popular fern bar, The Block and Tackle. Under the dark oak sign that hung from rusted chains and illuminated by hidden lights was the Block and Tackle’s slogan, “Everyone Gets Lucky.”

Jermaine waited for him at a back table, far from the dim lights over the bar. Too obstinate to sit on a book or use a booster seat, his arms just cleared the edge of the table where he cradled a schooner of beer.

“So what did you think, Bucko?” asked Jermaine. Gregory flinched. He hated being called Bucko. “Was it everything I promised?” He pushed a beer toward Gregory as he sat down.

Gregory sipped from the mug for a while before answering. The beer, cool and smooth, felt good on his throat. “Different. Very different.”

“Good, though, right? What did I tell you? Never a better time.” Jermaine tipped his beer and swallowed a huge gulp.

“Yes.” Gregory didn’t know what to add to that. After he had put her on the bed, he lay beside her. The light from the window shone off her eyes, and he marveled at how lifelike, how utterly human, she appeared. He watched her breasts, perfectly formed, for a rise of breath that never came. The bedroom was utterly silent, and it made him remember Sara the last weeks before she left when she would lie beside him, awake but not speaking, aware that he was watching her, not asleep and barely breathing. Stiff, weighing down the mattress and mentally not in the room, the plant reminded him of her, so he reached across her belly and caressed her side. The plant/woman rolled into him and wrapped her arms around him, startling him so that he almost jumped from the bed, but he didn’t. She was warm and felt good, her skin soft and firm; her smell, again he noticed, like wet spring grass. She pulled him tighter. For a long time he did nothing but let himself be held.

Jermaine rested his chin on the table, a posture Gregory had seen him in before but that had always unnerved him. A grown man shouldn’t look comfortable that way. When Jermaine spoke, his chin anchored to the table, the top of his head bobbed up and down like a talking clam in a comic. “Give her a week. In a week she’ll be at her best. Don’t plan on working then, either. Stay home. She won’t get any better than that.”

At the bar, behind Jermaine, Gregory saw women sitting, glasses beside them. All were turned so they were looking into the tables, but shadows hid their faces. Jermaine glanced over his shoulder, then put his chin back on the table. “Beautiful, aren’t they?” he said.

“Yes, they are.”

“You’re lucky now. Got one of your own at home.”

Surprised, Gregory said, “Don’t you too?”

Jermaine sighed and closed his eyes. After a few moments, Gregory thought he had gone to sleep. Then Jermaine said, “They all go rotten, you know, Bucko. All rotten.” He rolled his head to the side and opened one eye. “Pick ‘em while they’re fresh and dump ’em before they go bad. I haven’t had one in the house for six months. Before that I went through dozens, one every two weeks.” He covered his face with his hands and kept talking, muffled. “I fell in love with everyone, too. I know that sounds stupid, but I did. They’re dead, you know, or dying. As soon as they’re plucked. It was like loving someone with a terminal illness.” His breath caught, and Gregory wondered if he was crying. He wondered what he should do. Jermaine continued, “Sometimes I come here just to look, but underneath the air I smell ’em going bad. It’s all bad, bad, bad.” He drank deeply again.

Gregory saw a man walk down the row of girls at the bar, pause at one, look her over and then motion to the bartender who took the offered credit card and handed the man a key. He disappeared through a door at the end of the bar where Gregory supposed one of the girl’s “sisters” waited. Gregory had never “gotten lucky” at the fern bar.

“If you feel that way, why don’t you go out with a real woman?” Gregory asked. “I mean, Sara and I had a lot of problems, but we were together.”

“Doesn’t matter, Bucko. You hold them long enough, their love rots away.”

“Jesus, that’s depressing. So what’s left if nothing lasts?”

Jermaine said, “Lots of sex. Sex, sex, sex till it hurts. And even that’s a short haul, but maybe, you know, you could tie into something you can’t let go of. Something that’ll stick to you, and it’ll either kill you then because it’s so good, or you’ll remember it forever when nothing else will measure up.”

Sickened, Gregory looked into his beer. Because of the darkness of the bar, the liquid seemed black.

Abruptly Jermaine said, “Let me borrow your plant. I can’t buy here. They’re clean, but it’s the smell, you know, alcohol wipe and aftershave on their skin. Just for the evening.”

“Don’t be ridiculous, Jermaine.”

Jermaine fisted both hands as if he wanted to hit him, and Gregory pushed his chair away from the table. Gradually the fists relaxed until the finger lay flat on the table. He said, “I’m going home. Enjoy her while she’s still fresh.” He stood, all four-and-a-half feet of him and said, “You know what I wonder? I wonder if being plucked hurts. I wonder if it pisses them off. The beer’s paid for.” He left.

When Gregory got home, the smell hit him as he opened the door, a whiff of wet, old vegetables. He took a step onto the carpet and sniffed carefully, turning his head side to side, testing the air. “I’m home,” he said and felt immediately stupid, and then, because he was alone in his own apartment and there was no one to hear him, he said it again, “I’m home, dear.” He sniffed once more and rushed to the back of the house.

In the bedroom, the case leaned against the end of the bed where he’d put it in the morning. The room smelled fresh with a hint of his deodorant and shampoo. Nothing else. He put his hand on the case, snapped open the latches, but hesitated with his hand on the edge of the lid. No, he thought, it couldn’t be from here. Not yet.

In the hallway he couldn’t smell anything. Pictures on the wall of Sara and him horseback riding stopped him for a moment. He straightened the close-up that showed them side by side holding reins to horses that were blurry brown shapes in the background.

In the living room he caught it again, a deep, damp solid smell like packed leaves gone gray and slimy at the bottom of a barrel. He wondered how he could have missed it in the morning before leaving for work. The trash can under the coffee table was empty and dry. He moved into the kitchen where he checked the garbage can, the trash compactor, the garbage disposal and the refrigerator, all dry and odorless. Frustrated, he stood in the middle and clamped his hands on his hips to survey the room. He sniffed loudly.

“Ahhh,” he said. The field of African Violets on the counter top looked suspicious. Their leaves drooped colorlessly over the edges of the pots, and when he leaned close, the source of the smell became obvious. He poked at the gummy soil at the base of several of the plants. He’d over watered, something Sara had warned him about before she left, and now the dirt was muddy and rotting the plants.

He opened the kitchen window, turned on the stove’s exhaust fan and went back into the bedroom.

Later, in bed with the plant/woman, the light on, Gregory examined her skin. He pressed his finger into her upper arm, one of the few places he had discovered he could touch without triggering some kind of motion. The skin compressed exactly as if it were real, a quarter of an inch of give and then a hard resistance as if he were digging into bone. Close up, he could see nothing plant-like about her. He stroked her arm, which felt real. Even the slight whisper of his fingers moving back and forth was convincing.

He jerked his hand back and wiped it on his thigh.

An hour later, after lying beside her but not touching her, waiting, bizarrely he realized, for her to do something, he rolled away and dialed the telephone.

“Sara,” he said when she answered, “The violets are dying. I over watered.”

She said nothing. He listened to the wisp of static, a thread of a ghost conversation from some crossing of the lines.

“I can’t talk to you now,” she finally said and hung up.

The dead phone in his hand, Gregory sat on the edge of the bed. He looked at the plant lying on her back, and he couldn’t detect even a thread of passion within himself. He hung the phone back up, but before he let go it rang, startling him into knocking it to the floor. He grabbed it and pressed it hard to his ear. “Sara?” he said.

“Jermaine.”

“Jermaine?”

“Yes.”

He squeezed the phone hard. “Jermaine?”

“I shouldn’t have bothered you about borrowing your plant.”

At first, Gregory couldn’t figure out what Jermaine was talking about. Then he remembered. “Oh. That’s okay.”

“No. I mean it, Bucko. I apologize. I won’t do it again.”

They talked for a few minutes, and when they hung up, Gregory realized he felt more sorrow than revulsion for the little man.

In the cafeteria the next day, Gregory saw a haggard and unkempt Jermaine walk through the door, his tray in hand, and when their eyes met Jermaine looked quickly away and sat at another table. Gregory ate alone.

The African Violets weren’t any livelier that evening as Gregory contemplated them. If anything, despite the open window, the smell was worse. He put a thick layer of paper towels under all the pots, using up two rolls and part of a third, reasoning that if he could blot away as much of the water as possible, he might be able to reverse the rotting. After a half hour, he replaced the soaked towels with a new layer. He called a florist who said, “If they ain’t dead yet, don’t water again until the dirt’s like rock. Them violet’s hardier than they look. Try talking.”

“To the plants?” he said weakly.

“Sure. Plants got feelings too.”

He turned up the heat in the apartment, figuring that the violets would dry out quicker, but he couldn’t bring himself to talk to them.

Even though he had stored the plant/woman in her case, he slept that night on the couch.

Late in the night, something woke him. His neck hurt. One arm of the couch held his head higher than his pillow; the other arm forced his knees to bend a little bit so that the back of his thighs ached. He rolled to his side. What woke him? He strained his eyes in the darkened room; the DVD clock glowed a steady green, 2:17 a.m. A sound, he decided, some small sound that didn’t belong. The refrigerator motor kicked on and he almost screeched. A click, maybe, a metallic sound like a briefcase unlatching. Carefully, slowly, he raised his head and listened. The refrigerator hummed. Something rumbled in the distance outside, a train, perhaps, or some industry that day noises muffled. Something thumped. He pushed himself onto one elbow. A neighbor, maybe, opening a door or dropping a book? At 2:17? But it sounded like it was in the apartment. What in his apartment could make such a noise? A latch opening and then a thud? He thought of the plant/woman’s case leaning against his bed, the dead shape within, waiting only to be used.

His head raised in the dark, super aware, he listened for another minute, but heard nothing. Were these imagined sounds? Sometimes in a strange room he would hear things, creeping steps on a carpet, the tiny pop of lips separating, the crack of a knuckle or knee, and these could be like those. He began to believe he had imagined them. Then he smelled the rotting violets, but he’d been smelling them for hours and hardly noticed them now. Something else, though. He thought he smelled something else, something familiar. Cut grass. Wet, cut grass. Was she in the hallway now, hidden in the shadows, waiting for him to put his head back down? He thought, how patient is a vegetable? and he almost laughed, but he choked it back. Could her eyes really see? Jermaine didn’t say that she couldn’t see. Plants are light sensitive. He reached for the table lamp at the end of the couch, a lamp he couldn’t see but knew was there. His arm felt naked, hairs on end, and he almost expected something to grab his wrist, a warm firm inhuman grip to stop him from turning on the light.

He turned on the light. The room was empty. The hallway was empty. He wrapped the blanket around himself, took a carving knife from the kitchen, and stalked down the hallway to the bedroom.

The top latch on the case was open. Thoughtfully, Gregory pressed it closed. The mechanism barely held. He touched it from behind and it snapped open. The sound was the same he’d heard, the one that woke him. He tested it again to make sure. It had popped open on its own, he concluded. Taking a deep breath, he unlatched the bottom one, which was firmly shut, and opened the case. She stood the way he’d left her: her head turned to one side, one arm straight and the other slightly bent so the elbow pressed against the case.

She was beautiful, but like a sculpture beautiful, like a well done photo in a men’s magazine, not real, not thinking, and in an elemental way, not satisfying. A representation of human beauty. Not human. He shut the case, and pulled it into the living room. He would call the plant store in the morning and have them take it back. Then he’d call Sara. Maybe she wouldn’t talk to him. Maybe she would. He thought he would tell her this: “You can talk to plants, but they won’t listen,” and then he wouldn’t explain what he meant. Maybe she could show him how to save the violets. He slept in his own bed, and when he woke in the morning, he couldn’t remember any dreams, good or bad.

At lunch he wanted to tell Jermaine what he had decided, but Jermaine didn’t come in. Gregory pushed a lone corn kernel through the creme with his fork, waiting for him until the cafeteria began to clear. He stopped a man on the way out who was Jermaine’s coworker, asked about him, but he said he hadn’t come to work. “He didn’t call in sick, either, and I got a contract two inches thick to finish with him by tomorrow. So if you see him, tell him Roger’s pissed!” the man said.

Gregory dropped his tray on the nearest table and ran to his office and the phone. The company directory had both Jermaine’s number and address. Jermaine’s answering machine said, in a subdued voice, not the one Gregory associated with Jermaine at all, “Thank you for calling, but I’m not at home. Please leave a message at the beep.”

At Jermaine’s apartment, after knocking, Gregory pushed the front door open. The apartment looked much like his own, a small living room, a kitchen to the left and a hallway that led to a bedroom. Gregory felt that he should be scared, or feeling silly and out of place, but he didn’t. He knew what he’d find. And when he entered the bedroom, he wasn’t surprised to see a plant/woman case open on the floor; and he wasn’t surprised to see blood on the sheets that covered two bodies, a lot of blood; and he wasn’t surprised, not one bit, that through the sheets that covered one of the humps, protruded thorns, thousands of needle sharp, translucent at the end, thorns.




THAT HE MIGHT YET FIND THE UNKNOWN


And he set off running as if the devil possessed him, hoping that he might yet find the unknown, whose slow pace could not have carried him far.

    

—Alexandre Dumas











Spiridon Loues of Greece won the first marathon of the modern Olympics in 1896, completing the twenty-six and two-tenth miles course in two hours, fifty-eight minutes and fifty seconds. He averaged six minutes and forty-nine seconds per mile.








Time is distance to a runner, thought Waldemar as he sat in the company shuttle, waiting for his escort into Genotech. I’ve been here for twenty minutes. For me, that’s more than four miles.

Creighton, the company man, opened the shuttle’s door. “Sorry I’m late. We have to go through kind of a gauntlet here.”

A line of protesters shouted as Waldemar walked through Genotech’s front gates. “Humanity for humans!” one screamed, his young face twisted in hate. Another yelled, “Give God’s genes a chance!” Waldemar glanced over his shoulder at the waving placards. He thought it ironic that a few of the protesters were clearly enhanced, their lengthened or shortened limbs, their thickened or attenuated torsos reflecting manipulated genes.

But his eyes were drawn to softly rolling hills behind the crowd, velvet green with spring grass, lapsing one upon the other to the mountains beyond. He imagined himself training on their gentle slopes, the ground a cushion beneath his feet, each breath an infusion of sweetness and strength. The gate closed behind him.

“Idiots,” murmured Creighton, palming an access reader next to the door. “Noboby’s thought to look for rabble rouser DNA yet, but I bet if we analyzed a few of those Humans First folks we’d find one.” He smiled at Waldemar, as if to assure him it was a joke, his bland face purely unreadable, and his gray eyes a closed book.

“Aren’t they dangerous?”

“After that nastiness in France and the bombing at DeoxyRibo Industries last year, we’ve beefed up security. They’re a nuisance, nothing else. The athletic department is this way.” Creighton set a brisk pace down the wide, white hall. Lighting was indirect and discreet. After the freshness of spring outdoors, the air inside smelled processed and waxy. Not bad, but institutional. They passed door after door, numbered but otherwise unlabeled, each with its own palm panel.

“You’ll find the latest in training facilities on the campus. We own over a thousand acres behind this facility, plus we have sole access to several hundred square miles of federal land beyond that. Our people tell me there are more than five hundred miles of Duratrack trails for long distance training, plus, of course, the indoor and outdoor tracks. You’ll find at Genotech we’re serious about our enhanced marathoners.” His voice fell into the sing-song of a tour guide. “When our athletes are not training, we provide the best in-house education possible. Euthlos 4, for example, is completing an advanced program in Information Systems Engineering just as if he were in a real college on the outside. Of course, when he wins the Olympics he’ll have no time to work. Like our last champion, Euthlos 3, he’ll be touring as our goodwill ambassador.”

Creighton turned into a branching hallway, indistinguishable from the first. His beautifully polished dress shoes clicked rhythmically. Waldemar’s running flats made no noise at all. Creighton continued, “Most of this building is devoted to Business and Administration.” They walked up a short flight of stairs to a double wide door. Creighton palmed for access and they entered a room lined with vid-screens. A technician looked up from his display and nodded to them. “From here, we can monitor the trails to the edge of the training area, exactly fifty miles from here.”

He touched a button and a large screen revealed a small, gray brick building. “That’s Research and Development just down the hill behind us. All our athletes start there. The glass pyramid to its left…” He panned the view to the side. “… is Housing and Training, where you’ll be working, and the last building there contains the Med Labs.”

“When can I meet Euthlos 4?” asked Waldemar. Genotech had hidden the identity of their runner, like an industrial secret, as they did all of their athletes. They only competed once, at the Olympics, and they did very well.

“He doesn’t like the number. Remember that. Where is he?” said Creighton to the technician, who touched a button on the console in front of him. The screen flicked to a forest. A well-maintained trail wove through the trees and a long legged runner toiled up the path toward them. Waldemar had a glimpse of blonde hair and a determined look before the runner passed under the camera. The technician made an adjustment, and the vid revealed the back side of the runner winding his way out of sight.

“Six minutes and four seconds a mile right now,” said the tech. A row of numbers scrolled down the left side of the screen too fast for Waldemar to follow. The tech said, “He’s loafing again.”

Creighton took a pen out of his jacket and clicked it several times, then returned it without having written on anything. “Well,” he said, “I need to give you a tighter focus on your job with us.” He took the pen out again and clicked it once, as if in thought, then, decisively, jammed it back into his pocket. “I understand you’re fast.”

Waldemar blushed. “Oh, no, no. Not like Euthlos fast. I’m unenhanced.”

“You’re modest. They tell me that you hold the world record for unenhanced runners.”

“Yes, but who would know it? It’s minor league.”

“But you’re fast enough for training purposes. You can keep up at everything short of his race pace?”

Waldemar realized that Creighton was nervous about something, just like the minor Genotech administrator who’d contacted him a week ago with an offer of a two month contract for more med-chits than he could earn in ten years. They dickered, and Waldemar signed for a lifetime med package with all the gene enhanced therapies included, something only highly placed executives received. Since then, he’d been waiting for the down side. There had to be a gimmick. “I’ve done some running. What are you getting at?”

Creighton’s hand crept up toward his pen again, but it stopped before actually entering the coat. He studied the vid screen. “The Enhanced Olympics are a big deal for the Companies, but you have no idea how financially crucial they are. It’s more than just the pride of victory. Not just bragging rights. A victory in the Enhanced Olympics marathon will mean the difference in millions in new orders in the next four years. When a Genotech runner crosses that line first, it says to our customers that we are the cutting edge in genetic manipulation. The point is that industrial gene enhanced workers are at a premium, and the competition is cutthroat. Perception is everything. If the industries think we’re winners, that our technology is top of the heap, then we’ll get the contracts, millions and millions in long term contracts. The second they think we’re not the setting the standard…” He paused. “Well, we are the industrial leader. We have the edge. Euthlos is faster over distance than any man who ever lived… Faster than Euthlos 3.”

Waldemar leaned toward him. “Is it true? The rumors about sub four minute pace? Can he break an hour-forty?”

“Possibly.” Creighton’s hand crept into his jacket, and the pen clicked twice but didn’t come out. “On paper. We haven’t seen his best yet. That’s your job. We’ve designed the ultimate running body. Euthlos’ musculature, his tendon connections, his oxygen intake and lactic acid tolerance levels are off the chart. His body converts food into usable energy at the theoretical limit. He’s a beautiful machine. But his head’s not there yet. Lately he’s been… well, uncooperative.”

“Doesn’t he train with Euthlos 5? He’d be younger, but they must be nearly the same speed.”

“No,” said Creighton tersely. “We don’t want Euthlos 4’s attitude rubbing off.”

Waldemar nodded. “You need a stable pony. That’s why you offered me so much. No one else can do it.”

“Oh, exactly.” Creighton looked relieved. “You come to the point readily. Euthlos requires someone to renew his enthusiasm. Someone who’s not Genotech. We want you to settle the boy down, to get his head right so at the Games in…” He consulted his watch. “… two months, he’ll do us proud.”

“And all that time, I’ll just get to run with him?” On the vid, the empty trail stretched away into the trees. Already Waldemar could feel the Duratrack’s perfect cushion beneath his shoes and the undiscovered twists and turns of the paths.

“Yes, and be his friend. You know, push him in the right direction. One way or another, he’s got to be fast enough on race day. Maybe with you here, it will help. Maybe it’s true, what they say, about the loneliness of the long distance runner.”









In 1920, Hannes Kolehmainen of Finland lowered the Olympic marathon record to two hours, thirty-two minutes and thirty-five seconds. He averaged five minutes and forty-nine seconds per mile.








Fifteen miles into the session, Euthlos finally slowed enough for Waldemar to run at his shoulder. For the past hour and eighteen minutes he’d clicked off five minute and fifteen second miles one after another, slowing for the uphill sections, but making up lost time going downhill. He’d not spoken when Waldemar met him at the trail head, just as he hadn’t during their runs for the last week, and they’d set off together on the workout designed by the trainers. Every day Waldemar struggled to keep up with the silent man who poured through the distance, moving smoothly as a speed skater, his head never turning, never bobbing; his ground gobbling stride swallowing miles.

Waldemar checked the glowing heads-up display that appeared suspended before him showing their pulses, respiration, hydration, pace, distance and estimated efficiency. With an eye-blink, Waldemar could switch to a new set of readouts. Superimposing the orange numbers and letters on the terrain, the training visor was the best he’d ever worn, providing more monitoring and feedback than he believed possible. When he switched off, they were fine sunglasses. He blinked the display away and ran beside Euthlos.

Euthlos said, “Is this too fast for you?”

It was the first time he’d asked about Waldemar in any way. For the previous week, they’d eaten meals together, gone to physical therapy sessions together, been poked and prodded by the trainers who constantly wanted another blood, urine or saliva sample, and the only conversations from Euthlos were one word replies to Waldemar’s questions: “How are you doing?”—”Fine”—“What would you like to talk about”—“Nothing”—“What are you thinking about?”—“Running.” Waldemar thought it was like talking to a sullen teenager, but Euthlos was twenty-two years old and he didn’t appear sullen, only uninterested.

When Creighton had introduced them, Waldemar was first struck by the young man’s legs, the only visible manifestation of his enhancement: He had the legs of a man who might be six-and-a-half feet tall but Euthlos was no taller than Waldemar, about five-foot-eight. Clearly his legs were disproportionate to the rest of his body. When Waldemar finally took his attention off the man’s legs, he met Euthlos’ sky-blue eyes and unlined face, the skin soft looking and unmarked. A child’s face. The man didn’t smile.

“It’s fast,” gasped Waldemar. “We’re not too far from race pace for me.”

Euthlos slowed even more. A quick check in the visor showed that they dropped to a minute slower per mile. “How’s this?” the young man asked.

“Cruising.” The trail flattened in front of them. Waldemar knew they’d be running through an aspen valley for the next few minutes.

Euthlos ran easily and seemed to be sightseeing now. He looked up, where the sun flickered through the branches, and then scanned the woods to both sides, ignoring the trail.

“You’re the Waldemar, aren’t you?” said Euthlos.

“Whatever that means.” Waldemar tried not to sound annoyed. Eventually his reputation caught up to him, and people either thought him an idiot for it, or a hero. It started when he’d organized the “First Unofficial Rerunning of the Historic Boston Marathon.” It meant charting the course as closely as possible to the original one. Much was on intercity beltways, where pedestrians were forbidden, or through toll-trails a runner could hardly stop to pay for. The whole thing was a lark. Fourteen other distance fanatics participated, and they were all arrested for trespass and careless self endangerment. Only he had finished the race, and the word had spread in the small running community. Since then, he’d staged several other “unofficial” runs on historic courses, all of which, of course, were illegal and often dangerous. It was hard to imagine a time when thousands of participants crowded the starting lines for these races.

All in all, he thought, it was a stupid hobby, running the historic courses, akin to parachuting off tall buildings or bungee jumping from bridges, but the romance of the courses and the challenge of avoiding arrest added spice.

“Why do you do it?” said Euthlos.

“Run?”

“Yes.”

Waldemar didn’t answer for a moment. First, he was supposed to be preparing Euthlos for the Olympics, and he wasn’t sure what answer would be helpful. Secondly, he thought about their pace. The heads-up display showed that he was running at 65 percent efficiency, while Euthlos was running at only 52 percent. But at their best pace on the run today, Euthlos hadn’t broken 80 percent. He never broke 80 percent. Creighton would be waiting for them at the end of the run to review the readouts. It would send him into an apoplexy (only in Waldemar’s presence; in front of Euthlos he was quiet and understanding). But the answer to the question seemed obvious. There was no reason to shade it.

“I run for the joy. To run faster than I have before.” He thought a bit more. The trail angled up the valley and they crossed two small wooden bridges that spanned snow-melt creeks rushing downhill. “To compete with myself.”

“I’ve read about you,” said Euthlos. “I saw your time at Boston last month.”

Waldemar laughed. “You must have done some real searching. We don’t publish bandit race results. Most of the organizers and runners were caught and fined.” He remembered the long run up the series of rises called Heartbreak Hill. He’d lost the lead pack miles before and ran alone over the two-hundred-years-old course. The last official Boston Marathon had been thirty years earlier. There were very few citizen road races anymore. Not enough trails that weren’t crossed by the beltways or owned by industry. Too much liability. Besides, most people argued, let the enhanced compete. They’re better at it anyway. Traffic whined by on his left. People stared as they sped past, but he didn’t care. Inside his head, the clock ticked. Time ran and so did he; they raced to the finish.

Euthlos said, “Two hours, three minutes and fifteen seconds. I know about the other bandit runs too. There’s quite a bit about you tucked away for those who know where to look. I found four New York Marathon times, where you were never arrested, and I saw how you got picked up on the Bay to Breakers course twice. You’re no Genotech toady, like that bike racer they roomed with me last year. You’re the real thing. This Boston was your best though, wasn’t it?” The admiration and curiosity in his voice were obvious.

“If I’d known it would have got your attention this way, I’d have told you a week ago. But it’s no big deal; you’ve had a dozen training runs faster.”

“So, why do you do it?”

Waldemar took a deep breath. Since they’d dropped the pace, he felt comfortable and strong. He’d reached that point in a run where he felt he could conquer any distance. He thought about running hard, mile after mile and how the pain goes away. It was as if he’d become a god. Time and distance dissolve, leaving just the effort, and effort alone could transcend. And always, just beyond his fingertips, at a pace a second or two faster than what he was going, waited a great unknown. He ran for that, but there was no way to say it to be understood. Waldemar repeated, finally, as if it were a further explanation, “Because I love it. What about you?”

Euthlos snorted. “It’s in my genes.”

“Why do you hold back?”

Euthlos leaned into a turn, and for a second, Waldemar was afraid he wouldn’t answer. Then Euthlos said, “Give me a reason to run all out, and I’ll show you running.”

Waldemar didn’t know how to respond to that. The young man’s voice was so bitter, so venom steeped, that Waldemar wished he hadn’t asked.

“You know what I think of?” asked Euthlos. “I think of those other enhanced runners pounding out mileage all over the world, and their trainers and doctors and coaches measuring their progress. And I think about the Olympics, all the enhanced ones running packed together—because we’re practically the same anyway—a thousand vid-eyes pointed at us, millions wagering on the outcome, all those company scientists waiting to see what they accomplished, and right at a key point in the race, we jump off the course and run away.” Euthlos laughed. “And you know why I’m telling you this?”

Waldemar shook his head.

“Because you’re the first real runner I’ve met.”

“What do you mean?”

Above them, the line of aspen broke at the edge of a rock field, and as they reached it, the trees fell behind. The trail held the line of the ridge. To their left, the valley dropped to the creek that glinted diamond bright through trees, and to their right, rocky outcrops and granite bluffs leaned protectively over them.

“I know about running,” Euthlos said. “What’s your goal?”

Waldemar didn’t hesitate. “Two hours.”

“Good goal. St. George?”

“Yes.” The October St. George run in Utah attracted sixty or seventy unenhanced marathoners each year because it was legal, and the course was fast.

They ran silently for several minutes. Talking to Euthlos, who might be capable of a race twenty minutes faster than Waldemar’s best, Waldemar thought about the futility of his own quest for a sub two hour marathon. The enhanced world record over that distance was already thirteen minutes faster, nearly thirty seconds quicker per mile. Running all out, on a track, rested and psyched, he knew he could barely run one mile at that speed. He shook his head ruefully. Breaking two hours in a marathon reminded him of a cartoon he’d seen once of a disconsolate little boy with a baseball bat over one shoulder and his glove dangling from the end of it talking to his dad. Dad said, “So how’d you do today?” And the boy said, “I had a no hitter going until the big kids got out of school.”

The trail broke away from the ridge onto the flat plateau that marked the end of their run. From here, Genotech was four miles distant and generally down hill.

“You know what else I think of?” Euthlos asked. Without waiting for a reply, he said, “It’s exactly fifty miles from Genotech to the end of the Duratrack. Almost two marathons, one right after the other.”

“That’d be a long training run,” said Waldemar. “Too long for marathon speed.”

“Maybe. You ready to pick it up a bit?” said Euthlos, and he pulled in front.

“Sure.”

Euthlos’ long legs pumped effortlessly toward the finish. Waldemar tried to catch his rhythm, which he couldn’t really do because their footfalls were so far apart, but he could mimic the flow of Euthlos’ stride, the frictionless slide down the trail, as efficient and powerful as a gazelle.

Not until they were almost done did Waldemar think about the training visor. By then his thighs flamed from the pace, and his lungs ripped air in giant gulps. He put everything into keeping up with Euthlos. At the end, even the extra effort of blinking the heads up display into existence would have been too much. They crossed the finish line together.

As they had in the days before, they ate dinner together, but now Euthlos was irrepressible. “What’s a restaurant like?” he asked. “How was school?” “What do you spend money on?” “Have you ever been in a fight?” “What is it like to be in a crowd?”

Euthlos kept him talking until a trainer finally had to send them to their beds.









The Ethiopian, Abebe Bikila won both the 1964 and 1968 Olympic marathons. In 1964 he ran a bare-footed two hours, fifteen minutes and sixteen-second race. Four years later he lowered the record to two hours and twelve minutes. He averaged five minutes and two seconds per mile.








Modern training included not only the sessions on the Duratrack trails, but also extensive monitoring of their metabolisms, perfectly designed meals and nutrient supplements, and long sessions in the Race-Imaging Egg, an eight feet by four feet shiny black plastic shell, hinged in the middle, where Waldemar or Euthlos would be strapped for virtual marathons. The attaching of straps, electrodes, bio-feedback sensors and motor-response stimulators took almost an hour, and by the time the egg closed, trapping Waldemar within its dark and pressing interior, he felt panicky and claustrophobic. Then the program would start, transporting him virtually to any marathon course to mentally rehearse winning efforts.

Once he realized the potential, he’d simulated runs on not only the historic Boston course but also every Olympic marathon. He’d simulated a run on Mars, and one on the moon, but the lowered gravities were too realistic and nauseated him.

In his fifth session in the egg, he asked the technician to set up a two man race from the 490 BC battlefield of Marathon to Athens. The technician, an older man whom Euthlos had introduced affectionately as “Dr. Pops,” looked up the parameters of the program and said, “It’s not quite twenty-three miles. Real hot too.”

“I know,” said Waldemar, “and I don’t want to win the race. I just want to run with him.”

When the egg closed, Waldemar wiggled more comfortably into the harness. Then, the familiar sensory confusion as the program kicked it, and soon, he was running down a dusty trail, following a young Greek, no more than sixteen, wearing nothing but a belt. The Greek boy started too fast in the afternoon heat, clearly overjoyed. Behind him, Waldemar knew, the Athenians were celebrating their victory over the Persians. From his studies, Waldemar knew not only was he the messenger carrying news of the Greek victory, he also carried a warning, which explained his haste. The Persians would be coming. One loss would not deter the Persian king, Darius I. No, the Greek runner had motivation to hurry.

They passed a well. On the hills around them, olive trees drooped dispiritedly, but Waldemar knew there would be irrigation water. “Hydrate!” he wanted to shout. However, the program didn’t respond to words, and Pheidippides, the first marathoner, was doomed to run the distance without a drink, to die at the end after announcing, “Rejoice! We conquer!”

Waldemar ran the whole way with him, marveling at the determination, feeling incredibly parched himself, even though a part of him knew his thirst was simulated. In the last miles, the boy staggered, weaving from side to side; falling down, but pushing himself up and back into a broken stride that stumbled into a run. As the sad ending played itself out, Waldemar found himself crying. Athen’s stone walls faded away. He was back in the egg, sobbing.

When the egg cracked open, Euthlos, looking concerned, stood beside Dr. Pops. “You did the Greek one, didn’t you?” Euthlos asked.

Waldemar could only nod. Euthlos put his hand on Waldemar’s arm and gave it an understanding squeeze as he helped the technician extract Waldemar from the egg.









Carlos Lopes of Portugal set the Olympic record with a two hour, nine minute and twenty-one second marathon in 1984. He averaged four minutes and fifty-six seconds per mile.








A week later, Creighton sat behind his solid black desk, scowling at the papers in his hands.

“He’s going too damn slow. The designers say he’s capable of three-fifty-two miles anytime he wants to pop one, and that he can sustain a pace eight to twelve seconds slower than that indefinitely.” He slapped the papers down. “You’re supposed to get him to perform, but I don’t see it in this. A little bit at the end. That’s all.”

Waldemar sat in the barely padded chair in front of the desk. His legs felt pleasantly wooden after the day’s workout. Six miles from where the Genotech copter had dropped them on the far edge of the training area, where the hills were particularly steep and good for strength work, Euthlos had veered off the Duratrack pathway, then took a half mile long trail that ended on a rocky bend in a tiny stream. They’d taken their shoes off and soaked their feet in the iron cold water for twenty minutes. “No vid-eyes here,” said Euthlos after the water had turned Waldemar’s feet numb. “They watch me all the time, you know. Not just while I’m training. In my room. During classes. They monitor my communications in and out.”

“So what do you do?” The reminder of the vids made Waldemar uncomfortable. Creighton irritated him, and he felt no loyalty to him or Genotech, but Creighton would know they’d broken the training routine, vid or no vid, and any deviation would come up in their daily debriefing.

Euthlos smiled like a little kid. Waldemar was struck again by how boyish the man seemed sometimes, and it was hard to remember that he was twenty-two. “Oh, they aren’t as diligent as they think. Right now, the trainers see us on the trail rapping out some five-twenties.”

“You jimmied the system.”

“A man needs a hobby. I know something about vids, yes. It’s electronic sleight of hand, like this.” He picked a rock out of the stream and shook the water off it. “Watch,” he said, and he wrapped his fingers around it and turned the hand over. Then he brought his other hand beside it so he held two fists, knuckles up to Waldemar. “Which hand is it in?”

Waldemar blinked. “You haven’t moved it. It’s there.” He pointed.

Euthlos grinned and said, “Are you sure?” He turned the fist over and opened it. Water dampened his palm, but the rock was gone. “See, sleight of hand.”

Euthlos glanced at his watch. “Come on. I’ve got an appointment.”

Waldemar put on his shoes and followed the long-legged runner back to the course. They ran for a few minutes, then Euthlos cut off the Duratrack again and led them to the edge of a small clearing. Pines towered around it sighing in the morning breeze.

“Stay here,” he said, and trotted on alone into the middle. From the shadows on the other side, something stirred. A young woman wearing camouflage pants and a tan jacket stepped into the sun, where the slanting light set her short blonde hair aglow, like a halo. She smiled. Euthlos covered the distance in three lengthy strides and embraced her.

For a long time they stood, wrapped in each other, until, embarrassed, Waldemar retreated up the trail to the Duratrack. Finally, Euthlos joined him, out of breath and happy.

“There’s lots of things Genotech doesn’t know about me,” he said, and they resumed the workout.

After a few minutes, Waldemar asked, “Who is she?”

“She’s pretty, don’t you think?”

“Yes, but who is she?”

“I started corresponding with her two years ago. She’s from Humans First.”

Waldemar sucked in a breath. “Ouch. They’re terrorists! They hate gene manipulation. This doesn’t seem like a match made in heaven.”

Euthlos laughed sardonically. “They don’t blame the enhanced for being enhanced. Some of Humans First are enhanced. Besides, it’s much more than hate. What makes you think I’m a gene-change patriot?”

They followed the track around a weathered mound of granite, and then climbed sharply for a quarter of a mile. Euthlos said, “Tell you what. Let’s try something different. I’ll take the right fork ahead, and you take the left. They both end at our pick up point, but my course is about a mile longer. You’ll have four miles left and I’ll have a little over five. First one to the copter buys the other one a beer.”

“They won’t let you have one.”

“Well, a spicy vegetable drink then.”

“You’re on.”

The trail forked. Waldemar blinked on his visor and picked up the pace. The orange readout showed his first mile at four-thirty, while Euthlos clocked a four-seventeen. If they held that average, Waldemar would beat him by more than eight seconds. Euthlos’ readouts flickered, then went blank. He was out of the visor’s range, and Waldemar concentrated too much on the curves in the path to pay attention any longer.

Soon, the visor’s weight on his nose bothered him, and he dragged it off his face to hang from his neck. Wind cooled his eyes and the trail wound on. Waldemar pumped his arms; his legs glowed beneath him, and at the end he could almost feel it: the stretch of unknown self that waited at the reach of his pace. But, as always, the finish came and he could give no more. The last two hundred yards hung before him, shimmering in an oxygen strained haze, and waiting by the copter stood Euthlos, not even panting.




Creighton picked the papers up again and glowered. His pen clicked angrily, twice. “And what about this?” he said. He touched something out of sight behind the desk, and the vid screen behind him lit up with an image of Euthlos and Waldemar on the Duratrack. “We have too much invested in him to have it all crumble in the last few weeks.”

The runners on the vid approached the part of the trail where the two of them had turned off. Waldemar held his breath. Euthlos said they wouldn’t be seen, but was he that good? Could he fool his keepers? The runners flowed smoothly past and the view panned to stay with them. Just before they jumped off the Duratrack, the vid image split; on the left, the two continued the workout, and with sinking heart Waldemar watched on the right as they turned into the woods.

Creighton said, “It’s a game we play. He thinks that he can pull fast ones with vid imagery, and we let him think so. The psych crew tells us that it’s a good release for him, and we should leave him alone. It wasn’t my recommendation, I can tell you that.”

The vid switched to a long shot of them sitting by the stream. Creighton drummed his fingers on the arm of his chair. Waldemar thought about the next place they had stopped and the young woman in the glen.

“He’s just a regular guy, you know,” said Waldemar. “You can’t expect him to behave like a puppet.”

Creighton rotated his chair around, facing Waldemar squarely, his face flaring red. “Oh, I can’t? I can’t? What rights do you think he has in this? What rights at all? We own him from the DNA up. We own his patents. His technology is proprietary. There is no part of him that we don’t own. He can’t clip his fingernails that we don’t own it. He can’t get a hair cut, that we don’t sweep up his leaving. He goes to the bathroom, and it’s ours. You’d better understand, he’s not human, like you or me. He’s product. He’s a laboratory demonstration. He will never be ‘just a regular guy.’ So don’t tell me we can’t make him jump our way.”

On the vid, the runners put on their shoes and ran back up the trail. Waldemar watched silently. The story unfolded, jumping from view point to view point as they passed each vid-eye. Creighton raged on about Waldemar’s job with Euthlos, about the importance of the work, about loyalty and professionalism. The runners approached the second detour. What would Genotech do about the young romance? Had they already picked up the woman? Did Euthlos know? Waldemar swallowed dryly. Then, the runners reached the detour; Waldemar could see the rough trail faintly in the underbrush, but they passed it. The vid-eye panned and the two athletes continued on the Duratrack course. Amazed, Waldemar saw them reach the fork where they had split up.

Befuddled now, Waldemar watched. How could Creighton see through one set of false images, but not the other? Who is playing games with whom here? thought Waldemar.

“I’ll give you credit for this,” said Creighton. “That was a good idea to race him to the copter.” The contest unfolded on the vid screens. Waldemar’s image ripped the visor from his eyes and pounded through the last mile. Although he’d studied the old films of the great runners, Frank Shorter, Joan Benoit, Hwang Young-Cho, and his own name sake, Waldemar Cierpinski, and even watched himself occasionally, he’d never seen himself run like this, thin legs flashing, head slightly tilted, his eyes locked on some unseen thing forever in front of him. Waldemar nodded. Good form. Very economical. Training two weeks with Euthlos had affected him. He didn’t think Euthlos ran any better for having trained with him, but Waldemar thought he certainly looked faster for the time he’d spent running next to Euthlos.

On the other side of the vid, Euthlos opened up his stride. Waldemar shifted his attention. The young man stretched into a pace that Waldemar could barely imagine. A small readout at the bottom of the screen tracked the enhanced runner’s speed. Four-zero-one, three-fifty-four, three-fifty, and then a mind staggering last mile in three minutes and twenty-eight seconds. Waldemar’s jaw dropped. Euthlos had beat him to the copter by over a minute and a half.

“Now that last couple of miles was pretty good. Best we’ve seen, really,” said Creighton. “But I don’t want it to be too little, too late.”

Later, after a solitary dinner and a session with the athletic trainer to replenish his electrolyte levels and wash the lactic acids out of his system (he’d never recovered from efforts like today’s as quickly before he’d come here), Waldemar rested on his bed, thinking. If Creighton had record of their first detour off the trail, but not the second, that meant Euthlos wanted Creighton to know about the first. What was the young man’s purpose in that? It also meant Euthlos knew they knew he could manipulate their surveillance equipment. So, what was going on here? Did any of it have anything to do with the woman in the woods and Humans First? Was she using Euthlos to get at Genotech?

Wheels within wheels. It made him dizzy.









Corporate sponsorship of the Olympics led to corporate control of its rules, but even before the first enhanced games, the ideals of amateur athletics had long since vanished. The first genetically enhanced marathoner, Zatopec 1, running for Transubishi, won the classic distance in one hour, fifty-seven minutes and fifty-nine seconds for an average pace of four minutes and thirty seconds per mile. The first unenhanced runner finished twenty-second. For two Olympics there was an unenhanced division; then the division itself was dropped.








During their morning run the next day, an easy, flat seven miler that paralleled the old highway, Euthlos seemed preoccupied. “Did you ever see my predecessor, Euthlos 3?” he finally asked.

Euthlos 3’s win at the last Enhanced Olympics, in Alberta, was legendary. Six runners from the Indonesia-Pac Industries broke away from the main group at mile nine, holding a blistering four-ten pace for five miles, opening up what looked like an insurmountable two minute lead. The Indonesia-Pac design involved enhanced energy consumption and slippery joints in the ankles, knees and hips. For two Olympics in a row, however, the I.P. models looked good early in the race, then dropped out because of dislocations or heat exhaustion. This time, though, it looked as if they’d licked the problem. At mile fifteen, Euthlos 3 staged a lone charge from the trailing group. Each mile, by himself, for the next ten miles he ate into their lead, picking them off one by one. He passed the last two in the Olympic stadium itself, breaking the tape a scant half-stride in front of the second place runner.

A likeness of the finish became a part of the Genotech logo in stylized black and red lines.

“Sure. Who hasn’t?” said Waldemar.

“Have you ever spoken to him?”

They reached halfway and began the loop back. This morning, Waldemar knew, Euthlos was scheduled for a session in the Race Imaging Egg. Waldemar had a meeting with Creighton; then he thought he’d go down to the pool and relax.

“No, I haven’t. I saw him on a panel discussion last year on trends in heredity engineering. He didn’t talk. I think he was there for his symbolic value.”

Euthlos said, “He never spoke much—not after the race, anyway. He was pretty friendly before that. I only saw him once afterwards. He acted like he didn’t know me, and we’d done a lot of training together. I thought of him as a big brother in some ways.”

“That’s too bad. Why did you ask?”

Euthlos shrugged his shoulders, an odd movement in his eerily rock steady running motion. “He died last week. I just found out.”

Waldemar staggered a little bit, then caught himself. “God, no. I’m sorry to hear that.”

“You know what’s funny? I can’t find anything about his physiology after the Olympics.”

“So?”

“That’s all they do here it seems, at Genotech, is take recordings of physiology. They’re measuring me when I get up, when I eat, when I run. Always, just about. My records would fill a library if they printed them out. So would his, except for the day of the race and the ten days after.”

“What do you think it means?”

“I’m not sure, but I think they did something special for race day. I’ve looked at his training records. He was a maniac on the trails. He didn’t train like I do; they haven’t seen my best since I was twelve. One-hundred percent from him whenever they called for it. I know what he was capable of, and he couldn’t have done what he did on race day.”

“They drugged him? What would that do?”

“Not drugs. Something else. Something special they developed, but I think it killed him. I think it killed part of his brain, and it took his body nearly four years to figure out he was dead.”

“I can’t believe…” Waldemar stopped himself. He remembered something Creighton had said during his introductory tour: “One way or another, he’s got to be fast enough on race day.”

They topped the last gentle rise and the Genotech complex splayed out before them. The Housing and Training center’s glass pyramid glittered between the nondescript gray of the Med building and Research and Development. In the background, the hulking bulk of Genotech’s Administration offices blocked the view of the road and the never ending protestors. Euthlos trotted part way down the trail leading to Housing and Training.

“They’re pacing me for a sub hour-forty marathon in the egg,” he said. “Creighton thinks I have one in me. If I win, I lose. If I lose, I lose.”

The young man stood on the trail facing Waldemar, his improbably long legs locked at the knees, his little boy face looking sad and abandoned.

Waldemar choked back a word of comfort. What could he say? What was there to say? Creighton was right. The Olympics would be in six weeks, and Euthlos would run, whether he wanted to or not.

Finally he said, “You’re better than they’ll ever know.”

Euthlos lifted his hand, as if to wave, but he turned suddenly and trotted toward his appointment in the egg.




In Creighton’s office, looking over the last twenty-four hours of training results, Waldemar couldn’t concentrate. Creighton clicked his pen rhythmically. Waldemar wanted to slap it to the floor.

“He’s faster than this. I know it!” said Creighton.

He was opening another folder of records when a dull whump shook the office.

“What the hell was that?” said Creighton. Another thud rumbled through the floor, rattling the pictures on the wall. In the hallway, an alarm shrieked, and a clatter of footsteps ran by their door.

Creighton punched a button and a voice said, “It’s an explosion, sir, in the Training Center.”

Waldemar sat up straight. “Where?” he said. “Where is it?”

Creighton flicked the vid screen on and pulled up the Training Center view. A dull orange light glowed through its glass side, and smoke poured from a huge hole near its doors. A handful of people ran from the building.

“No, no, no!” squeaked Creighton, and he kept saying it under his breath as he watched the fire spread.

Waldemar stood, his hand covering his mouth, staring at the vid screen. He took a step back, then sprung to the door. In one motion, he pulled it open and would have dashed into the hall, but a security guard blocked his way.

“You can’t come out, sir,” he said, as he pushed the slender runner backwards. “We have to assume it’s an attack. We need you two gentlemen to take shelter.”

The guard pushed them toward the vid screen wall, all the while appearing to listen to another voice. A tiny patch of white in his ear showed where the voice was coming from. “It looks like this may be sabotage. You may be in danger.”

He pressed a spot on the wall, and a narrow panel, wide enough for them to squeeze through, opened up.

“Fool! No! It has to be an accident! Euthlos is in the Center. We have to get him out!”

The security guard directed him toward the door. Waldemar swirled to Creighton for support.

“He would have left with the others,” whispered Creighton, more to himself, more it seemed in hope than anything.

Waldemar tried to dodge around the guard, but the man caught him by the waist and held him back.

“I can’t, sir,” he said. “I can’t let you go out there.”

Waldemar strained again against the man’s grip, then gave up. He looked at the vid desperately. “You don’t understand,” he said. “Euthlos is in the egg. He won’t be able to unstrap himself.”

Creighton said, his voice as hollow as a tomb, “I’m sure you’re mistaken. He’ll get away. He must.”

“He’s in the egg. Look where the fire is.” Waldemar pointed to the vid. “Look at where the explosion must have been. He’s right there!”

Then the vid screen winked out, and the lights in the room flickered.

The next hours passed like a nightmare. The tight passageway led them down to a bunker under Genotech. Other executives joined them in the spacious but windowless lounge, all of them edgy, upset and snapping at each other. Creighton manned a communications station and grilled the security forces for news, and gradually a head count came in. Eventually, all the athletes and trainers were accounted for except Euthlos and Dr. Pops.

“The bomb,” said the head of security, “was in the Race Simulation facility. It’s too hot to get close. We won’t find enough to scrape up in there to fill an envelope.”

Waldemar, sitting in the chair next to Creighton, hung his head and stared at his hands. He thought, I should have told them about the girl in the woods. And the more he considered it, the worse he felt until he could feel nothing at all. The news passed around him and above him, but it didn’t touch him. He barely heard Creighton cursing for interior vid imagery. “Why are we cut off this way?” he yelled. “The explosion was in the Training Center!” Everything in the world narrowed to what he could see of his own hands clasped in front of him, the tops of his shoes, and the image of Euthlos’ face as he listened to the story of Waldemar’s last bandit run.

Information came that Humans First claimed responsibility for the bombing. A news vid showed a masked figure reading part of a manifesto decrying the use of “godless, gene technology.” Then the news anchor said, “Although damage was extensive, loss of life could have been much larger. Genotech has announced that in the spirit of the Olympics, and because of their refusal to give into terrorism, they will still send their team to the Games. Tragically, Euthlos 4, the much rumored and highly anticipated Genotech marathoner, is feared to have perished in the explosion.” Then the screen showed the last ten seconds of Euthlos 3’s victory from the previous Olympics.

Five hours after the explosion, Security announced that it was safe to go “topside,” and Waldemar followed Creighton to his office. The Training Center was barricaded off, while Genotech security and the police combed the building for clues, but the vids had switched themselves back on, and Waldemar watched dully as a hand held unit showed them the interior of the building. The head of security had been right; the Race Imaging Egg room was as if it had been erased. Nothing remained.

Creighton flicked the image to the records from before the explosion. He ran it back far enough to watch Waldemar wave, and Euthlos enter the Training Center. He slowed the images of people fleeing after the explosion, magnifying faces. Finally, after five or six repetitions of vid from the beginning of the disaster to when the vids kicked off, Creighton said, “He never exited.”

Looking at the screen, but washed out and exhausted, Waldemar said, “He was in the egg.”

“Those Humans First bastards must have chickened out, or maybe it was premature. I’ll bet when the investigation is done, we’ll find out that Dr. Pops had something to do with it. I’ll bet he planted the bomb, and it went early, taking him with it. I never liked him,” said Creighton. “They must have had something else planned too, otherwise I don’t understand the knocking out of our vid capability. And why for that length of time? Three-and-a-half hours? That was a separate action. We’re lucky that we’d taken security precautions.”

“Euthlos died.”

“He was insured. There’s always product loss,” said Creighton, absently clicking his pen in thought. He wrote something on a pad on his desk. “We might even be able to turn this to our advantage.” He scribbled furiously for a second. “There may be a sympathy angle here if we spin our press releases right.”

Without saying anything, Waldemar left the room. As far as he could tell, Creighton didn’t see him leave.









Lopes 7, an enhanced Olympian entry from Indonesia-Pac Industries, won the 2096 marathon with a time of one hour, forty-seven minutes and twelve seconds. Much of the speculation centered on the potential time of Genotech’s entry who was destroyed in a terrorist attack six weeks before the game. Dedicated fans mourned the opportunity to see a repeat of the stirring, come from behind victory his predecessor, Euthlos 3, had staged in the previous Olympics. Lopes 7 averaged four minutes and five seconds per mile.








Waldemar didn’t watch the Olympics. Instead, he continued training for the St. George marathon in October. On the long runs, he found himself thinking about his weeks at Genotech, and gradually the mourning leaked away, a little bit on each mile, a little bit, workout by workout. But the more Waldemar trained, the worse he felt. Euthlos would run full speed, he had said, when he had a reason to run. The vids turned off for three-and-a-half hours after the explosion. If Euthlos had lived, it would have been time to run the fifty miles off the Genotech property.

Long runs give time to think. Beneath him, his body whirred away, eating up the distance, striving to reach the pace, but he was always thinking about the things Euthlos had said to him, his boyish enthusiasms about the “outside” world, and his hobbies. So the closer the race in St. George came, the emptier Waldemar became. In the last few days, he felt as light as a wisp, hollow, a running device.

The first twenty-five miles of the marathon unwound as if the race hadn’t been the goal ever, as if it were a step toward something else. He’d long ago left the pack behind and ran by himself, without even the sound of others’ footsteps to remind him he was in a competition. The Utah desert scrolled inexorably past, but he paid no attention; his inner eye focused in, feeling the pace, feeling the building rhythm of his feet on the road. He ran in a zone, the effort somehow removed from him and remote, and he thought about Pheidippides rolling down the dusty trail toward Athens, a message of victory in his heart, the love of his city spurring his feet on. Waldemar thought about Euthlos too. “Give me a reason to run all out,” he had said, “and I’ll show you running.”

Waldemar entered the finishing straightaway. At the end of the street, a half mile farther, a finish line banner hung above the pavement. A small crowd waited, mostly family members and runners’ friends, and they cheered Waldemar’s approach.

Time is distance, thought Waldemar. A fantastic runner, given the motivation, a runner capable of holding a four minute per mile pace, could cover fifty miles in less than three-and-a-half hours. The distance from Genotech to the end of the vid surveillance was almost exactly fifty miles. The idea boggled the mind. It was preposterous. No one would believe such a thing was possible. If Euthlos had lived, if he had started running when the vids went out, it could have been the greatest foot race of all time, unwitnessed and unrecorded. Waldemar pictured a lone runner fleeing a burning building, knowing no one would see him go, stretching himself farther and farther. If he made it, freedom. He would have to make it. What else was there? In some races, losing is not a choice. Pheidippides would be proud.

Waldemar crossed the finish line and the people cheered him, both the enhanced and unenhanced. He didn’t ask for his finishing time; it didn’t matter. He bent at the waist, bracing himself with his hands on his thighs. People slapped him on the back; faces congratulated him. Most he knew. Friends. Other runners. Then, he saw a girl in camouflage pants, golden blonde hair, short cropped. It was Euthlos’ Humans First girl friend. What was she doing here? And who was that standing behind her? Was it Dr. Pops? But he died in the explosion!

A familiar voice said, “You broke two hours. You did it.”

Waldemar began laughing. Euthlos wrapped a blanket around him. The long-legged runner wore a tan jacket, like the girl, and his boyish smile was broad.

Weakness struck Waldemar’s legs. He had to sit. Someone pushed a water bottle into his hands, and he rolled its coolness against his forehead before taking a drink. He’d broken two hours; he’d run into the unknown territory, and nothing was different. Still, it was very, very good. He shivered.

Euthlos crouched down, draped a second blanket around Waldemar’s shoulders and whispered in his ear, “No one could run the way you did today. You’re a legend.”

Waldemar leaned into him. Suddenly, none of his muscles seemed to have any strength. Everything he had had gone into the race.

“You could,” Waldemar said. “You would have killed me.” He pulled the blankets closer.

“Who, me?” said Euthlos. “I’m no runner. I’m nobody. Just a fan. Just a regular guy.” He grinned.

Waldemar saw it all. Dr. Pops must have helped, and Euthlos jimmied the vids. He only needed three-and-a-half hours to make a mythical run.

“Come on,” said Euthlos. “I’ll buy you a beer.”




FLOATERS


No matter where Rye stood, the end of the world always looked the same. First, a disturbance on the horizon. If there were clouds, they boiled upward and thinned. If there were none, the air itself shimmered as it gave way to the forces rushing around the curve of the Earth. Then, on the edge of sight, a glow climbed higher and brighter, like a sunrise where the sun was a wall instead of a ball, intolerably bright, stretching to invisibility in both directions.

Land rippled before the pressure wave, rushing toward him, rolling under trees and hills and buildings. Before he could even flinch, it was on him, and the world went acetylene white.

After that, dust and lightning and smoke tornado storms. If he went far enough ahead, he passed over the blackened ground, finding no remnants of anything human, just miles and miles of empty, airless, lifeless vistas. Everything burned away, even the atmosphere.

In the virtually rendered world of the future, however, even on the burnt surface of a dead planet, Rye felt happy. No swollen glands. No weakness. His avatar stood fully fleshed and clean. No purplish welts of Kaposi’s sarcoma. Not pale. No shakes. No floaters.

It was part of Dr. Martin’s regimen. Once a week Rye and Gretta had to see the end of the world to emphasize the importance of their mission. When Rye took his headset off, he would look up to the hand lettered sign above the metal door, WE CAN CHANGE THE FUTURE, and know for himself that it was untrue.

It didn’t help that the note penned under the sign, in Gretta’s hand, said, NOT THAT ALL OF US WILL BE AROUND FOR IT.

After his last visit to the conflagration of the world, Rye had said, “Let me go back home for my end. I can’t help you anymore down here.”

Dr. Martin nodded sympathetically but said, “No. As long as the loop is closed, we have to keep it that way.”

Gretta stared at him through the conversation in the unnerving way of hers, but she didn’t add a word.




Rye worked his way through the security screens methodically. He tapped one access code after another into the programs, passing each level of clearance, getting closer each time to an outside line. The notebook with security procedures lay open on the table beside the terminal. Dr. Martin’s head wasn’t geared to secrecy. He didn’t lock the book up. He hadn’t kept private what was in it. But until now, Rye had never thought he would need it. Everyone on the outside believed him to be dead. For all practical purposes, to them, he was.

Still, the chance for discovery was high. Rye listened to the hiss of air coming through the vent. The keys pattered softly. He’d have almost no time to clear the screen if either Gretta or Martin woke up. Their rooms were only a few steps away down the hall, and in the converted missile silo, they’d long since lost sense of day and night. They slept in two and three hour snatches whenever they needed.

So he kept his head cocked to one side, waiting for sounds. Gretta was with Martin again in one of the three sleeping cubicles at one end of the short hallway that constituted the length of their living space. Across the hall, computer equipment and two small desks filled another room. At the other end of the hall stood the blast door with its steering-wheel handle. No missile in the silo, of course. It had long ago been removed.

Today, even his skin hurt. The gentle tap of the keys burned against his fingers, and his wrists ached.

The metal floors, walls and ceiling amplified every sound. Clicking keys pounded like hammers on stone. They’d know he was up. They’d know he was in the communications room, a place he had no need to be. They’d discover and stop him.

But if he could e-mail his sister, Annie, he could save her, and he’d live with the repercussions.

A black spot drifted across his vision in his left eye. He blinked hard. Sometimes that helped. Flicking his focus from left to right helped sometimes too, but this spot seemed unaffected and drifted inexorably upwards, never quite out of sight, always at the top of his vision. His M.D. called them floaters, one of the symptoms of CMV retinitis, a herpes infection of the eyes.

His throat throbbed. The glands in his neck were swollen again, and so were the ones in his groin. He shifted uncomfortably in the office chair, trying to relieve the pressure.

If he could see Annie again, explain why he’d left, he could tolerate the discomfort. He thought, I made a bad decision, coming here.




Rye hadn’t really believed that a secret, government project existed that needed his expertise in virtual reality, until at the end of the long plane trip and even longer car ride the soldier in the prefab opened the elevator door without comment. Sunburn marked his cheeks, and after a while Rye wondered if it hurt him to speak. The soldier hadn’t said a word since Rye and the unnamed NSA agent had entered. Silently, he checked their I.D.’s, then handed Rye a clipboard with a clearance form already filled out. Rye signed it.

“Do you bring a lot of people out here?” Rye asked.

“That’s on a needs to know basis,” said the agent.

“Oh.”

The agent said, “God-awful hot. You’d think they’d pop for some air conditioning.” He loosened his tie. Sweat darkened his collar. “Lucky dog, it’s cooler down there I’ll bet.”

The soldier took the clipboard and gave it to the agent to sign.

“Did they get all my bags?” asked Rye. “There are a couple of blue cases for my medications.”

The agent shrugged. He was younger than the one who’d accompanied him on the plane and more bored. “Everything’s there that went in the car.”

“I really need those cases.”

Handing the clipboard back to the soldier, the agent said, “I’m sure they’re around. If not, we’ll find them and send them to you right away.”

“I won’t be coming back up, you know,” said Rye. He remembered the briefing at the hospital. They’d found him just as he was checking out, and he was so tired and discouraged that a job offer from the National Security Agency that involved, among other things, a guarantee for paid medical treatments, sounded too good to believe. The catch was, they said, that he’d have to disappear, at least for a while. He’d get more explanations later, but once he took the job, he would vanish. His family would be told that he’d died.

Rye wondered if NSA hung out at hospitals recruiting people with death sentences, or if it were just a lucky coincidence for them.

“No one comes up,” said the agent. He smiled, not unkindly. “I hear it’s pretty cushy down there.”

“I’ll need my medicine.” A black spot drifted across the room, across the agent’s face, distracting Rye. He worried that he looked twitchy, always trying to see things no one else noticed.

“Let’s get you in the elevator,” the agent said, picking up two duffel bags.

Rye bent to pick up another, but suddenly grew dizzy, and he stood until the room quit spinning. He rubbed the spot on his chest where the catheter had been for ten days in the hospital. They’d infused him with medication to combat the CMV, but now he felt weaker than ever.

“You’re not well?” said the agent, grabbing another bag. The blue medical cases were behind it.

“They didn’t tell you?” said Rye. He felt steady enough now, but the black spot seemed to have paused in the upper right corner of his vision, and he couldn’t ignore it.

“Sorry to hear it. But it is cooler in the silo. What are you doing down there? Special hospital?”

Rye crouched carefully and picked up the blue cases. “That’s on a needs to know basis.”




“The rules. First,” said Dr. Martin, “we must remain in a closed loop. It’s the butterfly effect: You know, how the flap of a butterfly wing in China might result in a hurricane in Florida. Our smallest information leak could change everything.”

“Okay,” said Rye. His stomach hurt. Fourteen pills each morning. Different meds through the day. Random specks drifting through his vision. Between disease and side effects from the medicine, it was all he could do to keep from grimacing. He concentrated on ignoring his symptoms.

“Second, no fraternizing with each other.”

“I’m not gay,” said Rye.

“Neither am I,” replied Dr. Martin without blinking. “I meant Gretta.”

“Gretta?”

“She’s the other member of our team. Top-notch programmer. A graduate student from a class I taught last year. By the way, she might be a bit hostile. She’s not convinced a man whose computer background is all in 3D gaming is the right person for the job.”

“No problem.”

“Third, we have to work fast. Time is ticking on this.”

“I know about limited time.”

“Lastly, we can change the future. You must believe that or there’s no reason to be here. I can send you topside right now if you think you won’t have the attitude for the work.”

Rye glanced around the room. His bags were piled by the elevator door; the blue cases sat prominently in front. “Sure.”

“I know your prognosis,” said Dr. Martin. “We have a schedule for blood work-ups and medications from above. They tell me there’s lots of hope with the transcriptase inhibitors. You could do better than they think.”

“That was explained to me.”

“It’s tough, I know, but we’re working to save everyone. We all have a poor prognosis now.”

Rye thought, yeah, but your end will be quick. You’ll get to make your goodbyes. Then he decided that was bitter and said, “I’ll do what I can to help.”

A bare-footed woman dressed in black shorts and a Star Wars T-shirt walked across the room, barely noticing Rye. Her straight, blonde hair was tied back and looked like it needed washing. She took a pile of papers off the desk, turned and walked from the room. She paused at the door and said, “Is that our terminal game boy? We don’t need him.”

“I told you, Gretta, he’s a VR expert.” Dr. Martin sounded exasperated, but she was already gone.




Later the first day, under the headset for an orientation, Rye waited for the images to form in the two small screens that hung in front of his eyes, blocking his view of the room. Most of the equipment looked military. Drab green or gray, heavier electrical connections than he was used to seeing, a real sense of solidity in the construction. Different from the light plastics he worked with at LivingSim, a 3D simulation and game company in Salt Lake City.

“Go ahead,” said Rye. The darkness in the headset gave Rye a claustrophobic itch.

“Almost there,” said Dr. Martin.

Then the display flickered and the VR room focused. Dr. Martin sat at the console, typing in instructions.

He waved at Rye. “Can you see me?”

“Got it.” Rye made a thumbs up fist. It blurred through the bottom part of the display. “Pretty crummy resolution. Your reality would make a shabby game world. How many frames per second?”

“Yes, resolution is the problem we need you to work on. Information comes too fast for our system to handle. Anything that moves we lose.”

Rye looked to his right, then his left. The images streaked until his head stopped. “Where’s the camera?”

“No camera,” said Dr. Martin. “This is concurrent visual data from your point of view. We’re running chronologically constant with immediate updating, all gathered and synchronized through the power of four Cray computers in parallel alignment. From this room I can take you any place on Earth, and any time within 6,000 years or so. Here, I’ll put you on the surface. You can control physical position with the joystick, just like flying a jet, and chronological position with the keyboard, but until you get used to the controls let me show you what it can do.”

Dr. Martin typed in more instruction, and the VR room vanished, replaced by the inside of the metal shed above the silo. The silent soldier sat behind a desk, his feet up, reading a hunting magazine. Below the edge of the display, Rye saw his own hands resting on his thighs. That’s the problem with VR so far, he thought, you still can tell it’s simulated.

“This is the same spot a hundred years ago,” said Dr. Martin. The display fuzzed out, and now a meadow of lanky grass stretched in front of Rye to the edge of a forest and a low series of hills that looked vaguely like the ones they had driven through to get to the silo.

The rest of the tour included several stops in Des Moines at different times in history while Rye played with the joystick to control his movements. He didn’t find it difficult. No harder than maneuvering in a 3D game environment.

Finally, Martin took him to the end of the world. Even with the terrible resolution, which Rye had several strategies to improve already, the wall of flame and destruction afterwards stole the breath from him.

Rye watched it three times before taking the headset off.

“That’s our future, seven years from today.”

“Are the images real?” Rye said.

Martin inserted his finger into the file of computer printouts he’d been searching through, then brushed a strand of gray hair that had fallen across his forehead.

“I don’t know that I can explain this to you in terms you understand. Or, at least, not using the terms the way you use them. ‘Real,’ for example, isn’t a solidly defined word in physics.”

He talked for another fifteen minutes, and all Rye remembered was that at one point Martin had said, “The energy required to retrieve the future’s signature seemed so small to me, that for an instant after I worked out the math I worried that if I just thought the equations, that my consciousness would cut loose from our place in time, and I might never find my way back. Fortunately I’d made a small computational error, and it takes somewhat more energy than that.”

“So it is real?” Rye said.

Dr. Martin sighed and opened the pile of papers where he’d left off.

Rye thought about listening to his doctor a month earlier while Annie had held his hand, before he’d ever met Dr. Martin or known anything about the secret project buried in an Iowa missile silo. The doctor blathered about T-cells and opportunistic infections, about AZT and aerosolized pentamidine. In the vocabulary of it, Rye couldn’t see the disease. It sounded like bad poetry in a foreign language: host-cell receptors, monocyte, macrophage, Pneumocystic carinii, toxoplasmosis and candidiasis. Finally Annie had blurted out, “This is Voodoo medicine! Give us words we can understand.” And the doctor had tried. He talked for an hour, but the plainness of the talk didn’t change the mystery of the end. Rye had squeezed his sister’s hand while looking out the doctor’s window. The words rolled by, and they filled the air so heavily, that after a bit, Rye felt like he was under water, so he rushed from the office. Annie had found him hours later, his back against the base of a sculpture in the park.

“It’s Voodoo physics, isn’t it?” said Rye.

“You can think of it that way,” said Dr. Martin. “But it works.”




“What was that?” said Gretta.

They were in the VR room, the largest room other than the silo itself, which they couldn’t go into—Dr. Martin had warned them of the repercussions of seeing themselves in the future; Gretta had argued that they hadn’t seen themselves, so going in now wouldn’t make a difference. “We see into the future, but we drag the present with us.” Dr. Martin had looked at her oddly, then changed the lock on the silo door.

“I dropped my pencil,” said Rye. He bent to pick it up.

“Declining motor skills,” she said. “Difficulty with gait, balance, coordination, clumsiness and deteriorating handwriting. Here, write a sentence for me.”

“I dropped a pencil, for crying out loud,” said Rye.

“It was only a slip,” said Martin without looking up from his papers.

“Early manifestations of dementia can’t be ignored,” she said. “He’s not going to be able to help if he loses his mind. Dementia is common with his condition.”

“I’m not losing my mind,” snapped Rye.

“Mood changes. Irritability.”

Martin said, “Keep it up, Gretta, and I’ll show you some irritability.”

“I don’t know why you can’t be more helpful with this. Why do I have to be the vigilant one?”

“He’s not losing his mind. He solved the problem with the head-set display in four days. We couldn’t make a dent after a month.”

“I just dropped my pencil.”

“He’s said that three times now. Trouble keeping track of conversations is another symptom. So is forgetfulness.”

“It’s also a sign of depression or stress, Gretta.”

“I’m not depressed,” said Rye, but neither seemed to be listening to him.

Gretta said, “You watch him for awhile, and you’ll see what I mean. He needs neuro-psychological evaluation.”

She stomped out of the room. A few seconds later, the door to her cubicle slammed shut. Martin shuffled through his papers. Rye rolled the pencil between his palms.

“Sometimes,” Martin said, “I think she needs an evaluation.”

Rye sighed. “It’s possible she’s right, or she will be right someday. How can you tell if you’re losing it?”

Martin looked up. His eyes watery but sympathetic. “I’ll let you know if I notice signs of dementia. In the meantime, just for fun, read up on the symptoms and demonstrate a few of them whenever Gretta’s around. It’ll get her goat.”

Despite the floaters that drifted through his vision as thick as moths around a porch light, Rye chuckled.

Gretta’s voice came muffled through the wall, “I heard that.”




Two weeks later, Gretta began sharing her rest time with Martin. Rye heard them talking. He heard their mumbling echoes in the hallway behind the thin door, the creak of the bed moving beneath them.

Dr. Martin was fifty-two, face as gray as his hair. Eyes constantly tearing, as if he’d just read a tragic novel. Very unattractive, really, Rye had thought. He couldn’t see what Gretta saw in him. She was only twenty-three.

It seemed the bed squeaked for an hour. What am I doing here? he thought.

It struck him as such an optimistic thing to do for both of them. Or desperate.

Either way, he decided, the rules were off.




The last security screen cleared, and Rye was into the e-mail program. He’d thought it through. His message had to convince her that he was alive, and that she shouldn’t be on her flight. She couldn’t toss it away as some sort of crank mailing. He typed:






Annie,




It’s me, Rye. I’m not dead, and I have a vital message for you. Don’t take your flight tomorrow. I can’t really explain how I know, but it’s connected to the reason I’ve had to disappear. I’m all right. I’m asymptomatic, and have never felt better. I know I was pretty depressed about it before I vanished, but I’ve figured out how to live with it.

I could go on for years and never get sick. No one knows for sure. When this is all over, I’ll come tell you all about it. But what’s important is that you stay off that plane. It will crash. No one will survive. Stay off the plane.

It is me. I’m still alive, and you have to stay off the plane. Don’t take it! Call in sick. Do anything, but if you love me, if you love the memory of Mom and Dad, do me this one favor and stay off the plane.

Don’t e-mail back. It will get me in trouble.




    

Your brother,



    

Rye.







Rye typed the last word and sent the message. The mail service confirmed that it had been delivered.

He erased the message in the “Sent Mail Queue,” then, quickly, he backed through the security screens, reapplying each one.

Voices murmured behind him. Dr. Martin and Gretta were awake. Rye’s mouth went dry. The menu popped up, and he silently pushed away from the desk. In the all metal room, sounds echoed coldly. Even his breathing seemed to come back to him. His shoes squeaked as he tiptoed to the door. He surveyed the area. Old NORAD procedures covered one wall. The communications array glowed in readiness. Battleship gray storage lockers on the other wall were neatly closed. Nothing seemed out of order.

He froze. The computer monitor still showed the opening menu, not the screen-saver, a hand-drawn image of H.G. Well’s time machine that Gretta had scanned in weeks ago. They’d know if they saw the menu that he’d been using the computer.

Behind the thin panel that separated his room from the rest of the environment, Dr. Martin said something, and Gretta replied sleepily.

Rye stepped across the hall into the VR room, but he could still see the menu. How long was the delay? How much time before it kicked in and erased any evidence that he’d been there?

But Martin and Gretta didn’t come out for some time. The screen-saver blinked on, and all signs of his breach of security were erased. All except, of course, the ripples in the pond of time his message to Annie might cause. Those he couldn’t erase, but he didn’t care. The message was sent. Irretrievable. Irrevocable. He’d remade a tiny bit of the future, even if she didn’t read it. Even if she boarded the plane anyway and went down with the flight. His e-mail message hadn’t existed in their future—the one that ended in seven years and thirteen days in a resplendent wash of flame. And now it did.

Later, Rye rested on his bed, breathing out disease and inhaling health. It was a visualization exercise one of the alternative treatment centers had suggested before he went underground. Breathe in the clean air, breathe out the disease. He imagined foul dust gathering in his lungs, catching in his mucous, turning it gray and thick. He coughed and tried to bring some up, but that made him think of pneumonia, so he huffed deep in his throat like a dragon’s growl and spit into the trash can by his bed. Nothing. The spittle ran down the metal side, foamy and clean.

Exhausted, he flopped back on the bed and stared at the ceiling light. Breathe in the clean air, breathe out the disease. Send in the pristine troops on the inhalation; send out the camouflaged terrorists on the exhale. Every metaphor of light and dark, clean and unclean, pure and sullied he ran through, filling his lungs to nearly bursting, then releasing it all with a rush.

Finally, he closed his eyes, and bright negatives of floaters drifted across the darkness of his eyelids. They paused at each pulse, then slid a little farther, leaving light trails, and he thought if he watched them long enough, the trails would intersect and spell out messages to him. But they never did. They just floated aimlessly about, never quite clear enough to focus on. Illusive and indistinct.

He couldn’t breathe them out. With morbid curiosity, he’d read all he could find on CMV retinitis. What it all boiled down to was the results of a study from New York Hospital and Cornell University Medical College. The median survival from time of diagnosis was eight months. To combat it, he took daily doses of ganciclovir, which Cornell said would give him 12.4 months longer (on the average), assuming the drug didn’t destroy his kidneys.

Without opening his eyes, he groped for the glass of water on the desk beside his head. Twenty ounces of liquid an hour on the minimum. It hurt to swallow.

He imagined Annie checking her e-mail before going to bed. Would she be surprised? He pictured her rereading the message. She wouldn’t know the return address.

Across the hall, Gretta said something to Dr. Martin. They were trolling through scientific journals four years up the line, looking for new studies, new technologies, anything that might be a precursor of the end to come. Martin was driven; they all were. Seven years and thirteen days away. What caused it? How could it be stopped? In all of the world and all of the remaining future, they had to find the apocalyptic needle in the haystack.

Rye kept his eyes closed. In his memory, Annie was clear. No floaters between him and her in the remembered. Once, when he was eleven and she was eight, they’d been stranded at a movie theater that had sold out. Dad had dropped them off, but now they couldn’t get in. It was very cold. She leaned her dark-haired head against his chest and huddled closer for warmth. She’d kept crying quietly, holding onto his hand. He said, “Maybe Mom will take you to see it next week.” After a bit, between soft sobs she said, “I don’t want to go with Mom. I wanted to go with you.”

He wished he could hold her now. Dr. Martin and Gretta didn’t need him anymore. The problems with the headset display were solved. They were looking for clues in the future that he couldn’t recognize. And it was clear Gretta thought Rye was a hindrance. He wondered if she was jealous of the time Dr. Martin spent with him.

Rye could almost feel Annie’s weight against his chest when he was eleven. If he thought real hard, he could remember the feel of his cheek against the top of her head and how she shivered.

Did she get the message? Did she stay off the plane? There was no way for him to know until he could have a session in the apparatus alone again.




Rye tinkered with the headset. It weighed more than the game equipment he was used to working with, almost fifteen pounds. Wearing it for more than ten minutes left him with a sore neck. Of course there was more in it and it did more than the VR stuff he was used to also.

On the wall, the clock said 10:12 a.m. According to today’s news he’d seen yesterday, Annie’s plane went down forty-seven minutes ago. A scream rose in the back of Rye’s throat, but he bit it back and kept his face calm. Either she got the message, believed it and saved herself, or she didn’t. Finding out wouldn’t change whatever the outcome was.

“A kind of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle applies to our work,” said Dr. Martin. He sat at a console, waiting for Rye to tell him when to send information to the headset. Gretta sat cross-legged on the floor, sorting through the hundreds of pages of screen shots they’d acquired in the last few days. Many were too blurry to use, which was why Rye needed to adjust the equipment.

“How’s that?” said Rye, giving Dr. Martin the expected prompt. He was constantly trying out new explanations of what they were doing on Rye, as if he were working out different drafts of a paper on time travel. Rye’s hands moved steadily, and the profuse sweating fit he’d suffered from an hour earlier seemed to have passed.

“We can’t look at the future without changing it. You see, our knowledge of what’s coming didn’t exist in the future we look at when we look at it. So after we’ve gained any information from the future, that future may not happen. We’ve altered the continuum.”

Rye could see that the eye tracking sensors in the headset were the problem. The cone of focus needed to be widened, which would require more from the computers. “So what we’re doing is fruitless? Anything we learn will be about a future that doesn’t exist once we see it?”

“Not quite. There is a way around the problem. If our knowledge of the future remains with us. If we don’t allow the information to leak, then the future is unaffected by us. But that means we can’t interact with the world at all. We have to remain in the closed loop. If we send our knowledge out—if we even leave the silo with our knowledge and not say anything, the future changes and all our efforts are wasted. Our actions will be based on knowledge we didn’t have before we knew it.”

“Isn’t that the goal, to change the future?”

“We want to stop the conflagration, yes, but nothing we’ve done has affected that. We can’t come out until we can. Up to that time, we have to remain closed off. Any leak before we discover the cause could move the clues around. Some place we’ve already researched might then contain vital warnings about the end that didn’t exist there before. We can’t risk that.”

Gretta had been staring at Rye through Dr. Martin’s speech. “Your eyes look weird,” she said. She was wearing sweats and balancing a stack of papers on her knee. Lately she’d taken to sporting a baseball cap that perpetually shadowed her face, and Rye couldn’t find her eyes at all.

“You ought to see them from my side.” For several minutes, he’d managed to ignore the floaters, but now that she’d reminded him, he was acutely aware of the blemishes in his vision.

“And your bruises are worse,” she said.

“Gretta,” Dr. Martin said sharply.

“But they are! I’m just pointing out an empirical truth.”

Rye said, “Not bruises: Kaposi’s sarcoma. Has anyone ever told you that you need to work on your social skills?”

“Too much of a computer mind,” said Martin. “All her developmental years were spent in line code.”

“You’re patronizing me again. I’m sleeping in my own room from now on,” said Gretta, turning her back to both of them.

“Empirical truth,” said Martin.

The new chip snapped into place in the headset. “There,” said Rye. “Plug me into today, and we’ll see if this did the trick.”

The headset settled on his forehead, and the display screens flickered on, showing him a virtual rendering of the VR room. Martin looked up at him expectantly, his image crisp and flicker-free. Rye let his vision rove back and forth a few times so the eye-trackers could get a fix.

“What time?” said Martin.

“2:00 p.m. in the monitors’ room.”

Dr. Martin typed in the information on his keyboard; the display fuzzed out, and then cleared. Rye’s point of view was the silo now, where the missile had once stood, but now contained four computer monitors in the middle of the circular space. Each monitor scrolled the day’s news. Martin had told Rye that when he first started trying to discover what caused the end of the world, he had wandered through virtually rendered restaurants and shopping malls in the future, reading newspapers over people’s shoulders, or stood in front of televisions until the news came on. The process was time consuming and frustrating. “Everyone reads the sports and comics,” Martin had said, “and the science news coverage is pathetic.” Then, he realized, he could customize the news for his own benefit by setting up the monitors in the silo. They displayed detailed reprints of scientific journals; synopses of political events; reports of anything in the strange or unexplained category, and current events. But the monitors had revealed nothing so far. Even on the day before the end, they spewed out an unremarkable collections of stories and articles. Of course, there was never any mention of them either, which meant that they had decided to stay underground right until the Earth-searing fire. They never climbed out to warn the world. They kept sending messages to themselves until the end.

It was in the current events monitor that Rye had seen the news of the plane crash the day before.




Gretta stopped him at the doorway to his cubicle.

“I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings. Did I?” She was wearing gray sweatpants and a blue Highlander T-shirt cut off just above her belly button, slicing Duncan Mcleod at mid-thigh. “I mean, just being factual about people shouldn’t get you in trouble, should it?”

Rye didn’t have a chance to answer. Gretta had a tendency to talk in furious bursts.

“Like, I think it’s more honest to confront disease. Denial, you know, is no good. This whole end of the world thing, for example, would be solved if we just told everyone what we have found out. That’s what we ought to do.”

“But…” offered Rye.

“It’s denial on a grand scale. NSA hides stuff by instinct. Their argument about our technology having security repercussions is hogwash. The end of the world is more important than petty national concerns. We’re caught in Martin’s closed-loop idea. He sold it too well, and look where it’s left us.”

Rye thought how weird it was that he didn’t find her attractive at all. Since the heavy medication had started, he hadn’t felt a whisper of sexual longing for anyone. He wondered if it was his body disengaging from life, letting go of one desire after another. First, sex. Eventually, eating, drinking and finally, breathing. She was the only woman he’d seen in months, and she was neuter to him, a personality, nothing else. He didn’t feel an urge to drop his eyes to her shirt (though clearly she wasn’t wearing a bra): he didn’t have a plan for maneuvering around her affections. He couldn’t decide if the change in attitude was a loss or a gain. Overall, though, he wasn’t sad, so he guessed it was probably a plus.

Gretta continued, “You know why I think we never see news of us in the monitors? It’s because we tried to tell the world—how could we not, eventually?—but NSA stopped us.”

She paused. Across the hall, Rye saw Dr. Martin wearing the headset. His thumb rested on the tiny joystick that controlled his point of view in the virtually rendered world. The computers behind him captured the images, processed them, analyzed them, made comparisons to the previously gathered information. One of the three of them were almost constantly under the headset, exploring the world and time for clues.

“Here’s what would make sense,” Gretta said. “That we had a hundred crews like us searching for the answer. Not that you would care.”

Startled, Rye looked at her. “Sorry. I wandered.”

“No, I mean you don’t have a stake in this. I told Martin it was a mistake to bring you on board.” She put a hand on his arm. “It’s not your fault, really. But the end of the world won’t affect you. Boom—the world’s gone, but you’ll be dead long before that.”

“Thank you for that grim assessment,” Rye said.

“Not grim—the truth. I’m not into denial. What surprises me is that you can get out of bed at all. Sheesh. Your days are numbered, but you not only keep working, you seem happy most of the time.”

“That’s true,” said Rye, cutting her off. “That’s true, but it’s always been that way. It’s just lately that I knew approximately the number of my days. There’s always been a number for me, though, just like there’s one for you. In fact, I think I’m luckier than you because I don’t know the exact date for me.”

“I do,” said Gretta. “I scanned for it when you first came down. It’s…”

“Don’t!” Rye backed away from her, breathing hard. “I don’t want to know the date.”

She wrinkled her brow. “Why not? We can’t be into denial down here, can we? Why wouldn’t you want to know?”

Afraid that she would blurt it out, Rye felt like covering his ears with his hands and yelling at the top of his lungs. Instead, he backed into his room.

“Let’s end this conversation now,” he said. “I’m tired. I think I’m going to take a nap.”

“Oh. Sure, if you want. Just so long as you’re not upset about what I said earlier. Martin, he says I talk too much too soon. I’m working on it. It’s just if a thought pops up, I generally say it right away. I don’t see it as a character flaw or anything.”

“Gretta, I understand. But I’m tired now, honestly.”

When she left, he flopped face down on his bed and tried to enjoy his good news. The monitor had been empty of any report of a plane crash. When he had looked at today’s news yesterday, that was the main story. Now, nothing. Annie must have not only not gone on the flight, she prevented it. Rye smiled. He should have known. There’s no way she’d let a flight go without her if she thought anyone was in danger.




“The future is changing! The future is changing!” yelled Gretta.

Rye craned his neck around from his tiny desk. He’d been fighting off nausea by trying to figure out how he could tweak the equipment to gather information faster. There was no reason beyond the limitations of the computers that they couldn’t download the future at better than real time. The problem was how much information there was and how well they could handle it. In the meantime, his stomach hurt, and he kept getting dizzy. Some combination of the meds was bouncing his blood pressure all over the place.

“The future is changing?” parroted Martin as if he were an elderly Chicken Little.

Rye almost ran into him as they rushed into the VR room. Gretta sat underneath the headset, knuckles white, frantically punching keys with her left hand while jockeying the joystick with the right. Suddenly woozy, Rye leaned against a wall.

“The end isn’t there,” she said.

“What do you mean?” Martin checked her setting. “Of course it isn’t. You’re too early.”

Gretta entered new coordinates. “I went to see the end, and it wasn’t there. I thought I’d watch from France, where it would be dark.”

She changed the coordinates again, typing automatically.

“It’s prettier in the dark. The sky glows for a second first.”

She typed in new coordinates.

Martin stood at the console, confused. “How did this happen? It’s not there?”

“My settings were right. It was dark. I thought I was in the right place, but the fire didn’t come. I waited five minutes.”

Rye partially sat on the edge of a desk. He’d broken the closed loop by sending an e-mail to Annie. She’d not only stayed off the plane, she’d somehow stopped the flight. Is this what happened? Some kind of butterfly effect where her changed ripple in time lapped up on a future shore and prevented the end of the world?

Sweat prickled his forehead, as if a cold breeze passed him. Had he done it accidently? Had he somehow saved them all?

“”Where is it?” gasped Gretta. Her fingers flew over the keyboard.

“Maybe it will never happen,” offered Rye.

Dr. Martin said, “What are you seeing? I can’t follow your changes that fast.”

“Still not there. Still not there.”

“You’re just jumping a week at a time.” Dr. Martin checked a monitor, running his finger down the screen. “Try one month jumps.”

“Jump by years,” said Rye. “Maybe there’s years of change.” He hoped there was no end, that whatever series of events that ended the world would never happen ever.

“God, I hope not,” Dr. Martin said. “We need to find it soon.”

“No,” said Rye. “The longer she takes to find it, the better, right?”

Dr. Martin didn’t say anything, watching the screen intently.

Rye didn’t get it. Where was the jubilation? The end of the world was gone, and Gretta couldn’t find it. Their job was done, and he could go home. By sheer chance, he’d done a heroic thing. He’d saved humanity. He could go see Annie.

“Whoops,” said Gretta, holding her hand poised above the keyboard. “There it is.”

Rye sagged against the desk. “Is it the end?”

Martin checked figures on the screen. “Could be worse,” he said. “Could be a whole hell of a lot worse.”

Gretta flicked the joystick, then tapped the same key several times in a row, backing herself up or moving forward in smaller increments. She sat still for a minute, then she said, “Here it comes,” and she arched back as if watching something that towered over her. “There it goes.” She tapped twice and ran it through again. “Looks the same. Nothing different.”

Rye said, “How much time did we gain? How much longer have we got?”

Martin looked up from his monitor; his face dragged down and muscleless, as if the bones behind them had gone soft.

“Not gained,” he said. “Lost.”

Rye didn’t move. Gretta didn’t move. Rye knew she must be watching the turbulence after the end: clouds of electrically charged dust flashing back and forth at each other and boiling in fury.

“What?” Rye’s voice sounded very tiny to him.

“We’ve lost three-and-a-half years,” Martin said. The words came slowly and flat. “The end is that much closer.”

Rye stood up, reached for the two of them, then the room did a deep swoop and he knew no more.




He awoke to laughter. For the longest time, he kept his eyes closed and didn’t really listen to the conversation. The floaters bothered him least before he opened his eyes for the first thing in the morning. He couldn’t see them then. In the darkness of sleep, his vision regained its clarity.

“Now we’ve got some direction,” said Dr. Martin.

“Oh, yes,” said Gretta. “I can start tracking the branches of possibility; you can go after biographies.”

They were in the room with him. Slowly, Rye guessed they were in his room. He could smell the astringents and alcohol wipes.

They would hate him, wouldn’t they? He scrunched his eyes tighter. Adolf Hitler couldn’t measure up to the crime I’ve committed, thought Rye. He didn’t kill everyone on Earth.

Dr. Martin laughed again.

“He’s awake, I think,” said Gretta. “Rye… Rye.”

Someone prodded his arm.

“Gretta!”

Offended sounding, she said, “He’s got to wake up sometime.”

Not able to put it off any longer, Rye opened his eyes and sat up. Everything swirled, and he lay back hurriedly. “I’m sorry,” he said.

Gretta snorted, “Isn’t that rich. He doesn’t know what he’s done.”

Confused, Rye eyed them warily. Gretta leaned toward him, her elbows resting on her knees, and her chin in the cup of her hands. Dr. Martin sat beside her, one hand draped on the back of her chair.

Rye took a deep breath. His lungs felt papery thin and his skin transparent, but he didn’t feel sick to his stomach, and his sight didn’t seem any worse. But a heaviness pressed him down into the bed. Three-and-a-half years less time for all of humanity. And for what? So Annie could die with them at the end? So Annie could look up the second before the flame hit and join the mass exodus?

Rye turned his head away.

Dr. Martin said, “You’ve done us all a great favor, Rye. I checked the computer records. I know about the message to your sister.”

The metal wall beside his bed had a long scratch in it. Rye stared at that. Underneath the sheets, he dug his fingernails into his palms.

“Rye, you have to understand. For months we’ve been looking for clues about the end, but there’s never been anything. No clues at all, Rye. Nothing. And the more we looked, the more I’ve feared that there was nothing we could do. That the end wasn’t caused by human actions.”

The words didn’t make sense, but the tone did. Dr. Martin wasn’t angry. Neither was Gretta. Rye looked at them.

Gretta said, “Come on, bruise-head. Don’t you see? Your sister didn’t die, and neither did anyone on her plane. Now the end has changed. Something someone does or doesn’t do because that plane didn’t go down causes the end of the world to happen sooner.”

“Human action caused it, Rye. And if it’s human, we can find it and prevent it. And not only that, but you’ve given us a place to start, your sister’s flight.”

Rye sat up again, this time much more slowly. The room tipped only slightly.

“We can stop it?”

Gretta said, “See, even a game boy can figure this stuff out if you give him time.”

Dr. Martin frowned at her, then rubbed her shoulder as he stood.

“We will, but not you. I’m sending you topside. You can get better medical treatment there I think.”

Bed sheets tangled around his feet, and it took a second to get them free and put them on the floor. “But what about the closed loop of information? I’ve seen the future. Going topside will affect it in unpredictable ways.” Rye’s voice rasped. Gretta offered him a glass of water and a handful of pills, his daily dosage.

“Oh, the loop’s busted now, and we haven’t done much investigating yet. So this is the only reasonable time to let you go. Once you’re out and can’t look at the future, you can’t change it. You won’t change your actions based on any new future you see. You’ll be out of the loop.”

Gretta said, “And you can be with your sister.”




Dr. Martin and Gretta loaded most of Rye’s baggage into the elevator for him.

“The guarantee for medical treatment is still good,” said Dr. Martin. “NSA has it arranged for you to check into a clinic in Sante Fe. They have new techniques.”

Rye shook his hand. “Thanks, but my condition is way advanced. It’ll be like painting the barn after it’s fallen. I’m going to get to go home though. I’m going to call Annie.”

Reaching past him, Dr. Martin pushed the elevator button. “You’ll need to bail her out first.”

“Excuse me?” said Rye. He braced his hand against the door to hold it open.

Dr. Martin grinned, his eyes looking less watery now and more like they glistened. “She stopped that flight by calling in a bomb threat. They’ve got her on a terrorism charge, but they don’t know what to do with her. The bomb squad didn’t find any explosives, of course, but they did find a fatal mechanical flaw. The press got the story, and no one’s sure if she’s a criminal or a saint.”

“I don’t suppose,” said Rye, “that you could get someone from the NSA to intervene.”

“Consider it done.” Dr. Martin put his arm around Gretta. “Now, you’d better get going. We have work to do here.”

Gretta solemnly shook his hand also, pressing a slip of paper into his palm. “Be sure you go to Sante Fe,” she said. Her eyes locked on his intensely, and she didn’t release his hand until he nodded.

The door slid closed, and the elevator began to rise. Rye struggled to read Gretta’s note through the floaters and the graying of his vision.

It read, YOUR DATE CHANGED TOO.




THE ROAD’S END


So close to the road’s end, the traveler couldn’t remember the beginning. The trail climbed the mountain, and all he could do was to lean into the slope, one hand resting on his sword’s grip, the other hooked behind the leather strap that held all his belongings on his back. His thighs burned, but he’d climbed so many mountains, walked so many miles, he knew how far he could go before rest. Every day presented more miles. Every day the horizon changed but remained as unreachable. Still, he walked.

The fingers of his sword hand stuck together. He raised them absently to his mouth and licked the wolf’s blood. Sweat flavored it, and dust. The wolf itself lay dead in the leaves at the trail’s foot. Of course, it was another legendary wolf he’d been warned about at the last inn. “Beware the Darkwood Killer,” said the innkeeper, a young man with stout arms and no hint of a beard. “A hundred men have tried their luck. Don’t go that path,” he’d said.

“Only a hundred?” said the traveler. He finished his meal, thanked the innkeeper for the courtesy, then continued on.

How many wolves had fallen in the past years? How many years had it been? The traveler didn’t know. When wolves didn’t guard the way, other barriers arose: Bridges hid trolls. Ghosts haunted castles. Beautiful princesses with hearts of black hemlock waited in court. Caves held dragons. Rivers flowed and gurgled and whispered seductively in the moonlight, waiting for him to bend for an instant to listen. Roads possessed plans of their own, changing their turns, and they led him down evil ways. Or magicians cast spells.

The traveler sighed. One more step planted in front of the other. One more climbing effort up the mountain. Would a corrupted king wait at its top? Or a giant? Or a minor god?

A biting wind dropped from the heights. He pulled his cloak closer about his shoulders, and on the distant peaks, gray snow merged with gray clouds. Already he’d passed beyond the grain fields and vegetable gardens below, all the mundane farmers and villagers who hardly waved at his passing.

If they knew his name, they would crowd the way before him because his stories traveled much faster than he did, sometimes so changed he hardly recognized himself in them. “Tell us about the witches at Coverst Crest,” one would say. “Did you really quell the beast of Fordham Falls?” another might ask. “Can I see your sword?” a child with quivering lip would say. The fathers pointed him out to their sons or hid their eager daughters behind them. Other men, valorous men, nodded or raised an open palm when he passed. Gates opened. Lanterns lit. Musicians played. They pushed close for the stories. If they knew his name.

He’d grown tired of turning around, but he stopped for a moment to look down the climbing trail. Trees bent in the wind below. Smoke hustled away from the distant chimneys. Parts of the path peeked through the forest until fog hid it all.

Where he’d been didn’t matter anymore, except that sometimes the enemies came from his back. He shivered. Every step today seemed haunted with recognition. That tree! That red thrust of rock, bare on the hill! That small pond with trees leaning in just so! Perhaps he’d traveled so far that nothing new existed. Everything had crossed his path, and the world held no more surprises. Still, he walked on, because that was what he did, the traveler, pushing onward toward the heights.

To his left, scraggly brush that rattled against the wind gave way to ragged granite teeth and a rising slope to black bluffs. To his right, the mountain dropped sharply to a tiny stream cascading from one rock to the next. He thought about mountain creatures: bad tempered long horned sheep who blocked the way, or shag-shouldered bears rearing on hind legs, their claws as sharp as nightmares, or mountain men who’d become more mountain than men with fingers that broke stone.

His hand tightened on the sword’s hilt as he glanced from side to side. The old feeling, the familiar one tingled along his arms’ coarse hair. Something waited or stalked or crouched somewhere on the path ahead. An ambush. An attack. A trap. Or was that it at all? The air had a tinge to it he recognized. The sun slanting through the clouds walked across the distant peaks in a strangely reminiscent way. But he moved forward. Whatever waited still waited, and the road’s tyranny continued. He had to press on, although he couldn’t remember exactly what it was that had started him on the quest, what long-ago undertaking took him from his home. Whatever the deed was, he’d accomplished it. That was clear. But what was it? Every act since had been to return home. Why had he left?

He shook his head. No, he couldn’t recall. Had there been a stronghold long ago that was his own? The memory hardly seemed there. Tall walls that stood against the morning mists? A gate? He pictured an intricately bricked arch and solid columns, a sandy path between. And there was music.

But what was that? A memory? A dream? A wish?

The trail curved around the mountain’s shoulder. His boots ground gravel into the dirt. His breath came heavily and measured. These were things he could sense much more than troubling whispers of nearly lost times. Believe in the road, he thought. Believe in the next heartbeat. The mind should be empty, like a bowl. Empty and aware, or the enemies will catch me in my distraction. All reflex.

Something flicked by the corner of his eye. With a snarl, he snapped his sword around, felt the slight contact, then stood at guard, balanced on the balls of his feet, hands away from his sides. The mountain’s pulse, it seemed, seized for a moment, but nothing else stirred within his sight. The trail curled away as before. A gust of wind hurried over scant grass, bending it down, whistling through his ears, carrying the dry scent of pine before it calmed.

Finally, he looked at his feet. A small gray bird lay in the dust, cleft into two parts, a splash of blood across one extended wing, a scattering of feathers quivering in the air, a bent claw extended and clenching up as if to grasp a branch. Just a bird. But the feeling that a trial waited ahead didn’t leave him. If anything, the feeling grew stronger like a thickening in the air. He wiped the blade clean, left it unsheathed, and then stalked forward, each cautious stride revealing a fragment more of the unknown path. The top of a tree peeked over the hill, then gradually, branch by branch, revealed itself until the whole tree stood rooted to the mountainside. As always, landscape unfolded before him, slowly, oh so slowly, his sword tip arcing before him like a steel finger with each step, until from around the hill his trek revealed a man standing astride the trail a stone’s throw away.

The traveler continued toward him. The man’s shield showed use, and his sword’s grip was worn and practical, not decorative. He wore no helmet, though—his face showed no lines, and his dark hair reminded the traveler of his own before age had grayed it. The man’s arms were crossed on his chest, well away from his weapons.

“Well met, stranger,” said the traveler, lowering his sword.

“I expected you long ago.” The man’s voice carried clearly. “We’ve waited.”

Nothing moved in the trees ahead, and they were too far away for even a skilled archer to reach him. No rock or bush close by seemed big enough to hide an accomplice, and the traveler couldn’t smell horses or men in the wind. Still, he stepped off the trail so he would be above the stranger as he approached. Even in a sword fight, height gives an advantage.

The traveler sheathed his blade. “I am expected?” He looked again at the trees and the trail’s shape. Once again, the feeling that he’d been on this road before struck him.

“Long expected. Long missed.” The younger man’s gaze was steady. His posture was poised, too, competent and prepared.

For a moment, they faced each other without speaking. The traveler puzzled the comment. At last, he said, “Missed by who?”

“My mother,” said the young man, “and me.” For an instant, an intervening cloud blocked the beams of sun that had dressed the mountains behind the man, then it shifted again, and a shaft of light lit a mountain peak as if it were on fire. “I’ve never known you, Father,” the young man said.

The traveler sighed. Of course, he could see it now in the young man’s face, the curve of his cheek, his mother’s eyes. When the traveler had left so long ago, there had been a baby. He recalled now, dimly, a last embrace, a kiss on a baby’s head, before shouldering his pack and setting out from his home. He looked past the young man, his son, and remembered that the path would curve one more time. His holdings would open out before him then. The small fields of hardy, mountain produce. The farmers’ huts, and, behind them, his stronghold, rising out of the mountain’s native stone, like a rock formation.

“I am sorry for my long travels,” he said. “Lead me home.”

After the curve, the trail spilled into a long and narrow valley, much as the traveler recalled, although it seemed there were fewer huts, and the buildings were more aged. Weather stained their wood walls. The thatching sagged on the roofs.

A farmer paused in his digging as they passed, his face a blank page. The traveler nodded in his direction, but the farmer had already returned to his work.

The stronghold, though, stood even stauncher than he had envisioned. From the high parapet two flags snapped briskly in a wind that didn’t touch him as he approached the stone archway. The traveler’s hand brushed against the smooth wall, so solid and cool against his knuckles, and he suddenly remembered running past this wall when he was a boy. He shrugged his shoulders in bewilderment. A boy? It had been so long since his life had been anything except the road and the weary walk.

Beyond the arch, through the thick battlements, a courtyard opened before them, and where the sky wrapped from horizon to horizon before, now the walls dominated, relegating the sky to a much smaller square overhead. Gray stone. Sturdy buildings marked with decorated wooden doors. A closed in smell that brought back a hundred new memories. Wood smoke. Stabled animals. Wet hay.

Across the courtyard, a well appointed elderly woman, flanked by two spearmen waited for them at the foot of the broad stairs that led up to the Great House. As he approached, he could see that she knew him. Her posture, already balanced, became even more regal, but she trembled slightly, and ventured a step toward him that she immediately took back.

He stopped before her. In the brief instant before she spoke, he saw within her lined features the young woman he’d left so many years ago.

“Husband,” she said.

“Wife.”

Their embrace was long. The traveler smelled the remembered perfume, the sweet underscent of her skin. Her tears dampened his face, and for a moment, all the years dropped away. They were young again and courting, when she had teased him from horseback, outracing his own horse on the windy forest trails she knew so well; when she beckoned him to sit at streamside, and they talked long and earnestly about their lives to come; and when she danced in the Great House hall, far surpassing the other women who once vied for his attentions. For the moment of the embrace, the world became her, and he realized the dampness on his face was his own tears too.

So he did not object when the servants took his sword to hang above the Great House fireplace, or gave him new, fine clothes to replace the road-worn ones. Nor did he object to the welcome home feast where his grown son toasted to his good health and then returned the ruler’s scepter, or when his wife led him up the stairs they had walked so many years before to the wedding chamber. It seemed he floated, now, so much weight had disappeared.

But much later, when the only sounds in the Great House were the skittering of mice and the familiar pulsing throb in his ears, the traveler roused himself from the bed and padded barefoot to the open window overlooking the courtyard. A full moon showed brightly on the well-swept walk from the archway entrance. Quartz or mica flecks in the stone caught the light so that the path looked more like a river than a road. It flowed from the entrance, through the courtyard, and then emptied into the darkness of the stronghold’s backdoor, a little used exit barely wide enough for a man and the belongings on his back. He stared at the shadowed door for a long time, the evening breeze washing over his nakedness until goosebumps roughened his skin. The light seemed to gravitate to that spot as if the courtyard were tilted. What was it that drew his gaze there? Behind him, the bed, so much softer than most he had slept in in his journeys, beckoned. His wife, still the young woman in her heart, still in love with the young man in his, slumbered deeply there, waiting for him even now.

But there was the mysterious door.

He leaned against the window’s sill so he could see it better. Moonlight touched his hands and face. Then, he remembered. He pictured it: his hand reaching out, unlatching the heavy bolt, all those years ago. His quest began there where the road led him from enigma to revelation, and from danger to triumph, over and over again. That’s where he had started, his wife’s last caress fresh on his lips, his sword untested and keen in its sheath.

Who was that young man then? The traveler felt that he knew of him, but he didn’t know him, just as he knew of the son who had spoke so loudly for him at the dinner that evening, but he did not know him, not like a father should know a son. Nor did he know the woman in the bed. Not really. She was like a story told to him about another woman, another man’s wife. A romance he learned about. Not his.

He shivered. Was the stronghold even a part of him?

A hazy cloud passed in front of the moon, dimming the courtyard, so it almost disappeared, but the road seemed to glisten just as brightly.

The woman coughed in the shadows behind him as she rolled in her sleep. The traveler flinched. He didn’t recognize her breathing. The stone sill beneath his hand felt rough-edged and unfamiliar. He rose on the balls of his feet. His hands drifted away from the window and floated at his sides, relaxed, ready to defend him. Without thinking, he moved away from the silhouetting window and into the room’s darkest corner. There, he watched. Did the ornate arras that covered the far wall move, just a little? Could there be someone behind it? Quiet as the moonlight, he moved from one corner to the next, until he stood at the tapestry. It lay nearly flat against the wall, barely room for a sword to fit behind it, much less an assassin, but his heart still pumped as if he’d run a long race, and his mouth felt dry.

The woman in the bed stirred again. Her white hair wisped across the bed’s covers, all light shadows and dark shadows. He crept around the room’s door and into the hallway beyond where his foot encountered a pile of soft cloth, his old travel clothes. The shirt pulled on easily, as did the pants and much-patched boots.

No less quiet than before, the traveler stalked down the stairs. The lay of the stronghold seemed less familiar every step he took. The shape of a chandelier surprised him. An unfamiliar draft caught him unawares. With some difficulty, he found his way to the Great House fireplace and retrieved his sword. When he held it, its weight pushed him down just enough that he felt he was touching the earth again. He remembered the quick flick of his wrist earlier and the bird cleft in two, and he smiled sadly at the thought. For good or ill, the sword was a part of him. Not like this strange fortress that reeked of memories and people who did not know him.

He moved now with purpose, across the Great Hall to the throne room where he found the scepter on the high seat where he’d left it. Like a ghost, passing through one dancing-dust moonbeam at a window and into the next, he wandered until he found his son’s living quarters, marked by a sign above the door. The traveler leaned the scepter against the polished wood. It looked better there than in his hand.

Minutes later, he stood at the small door he had seen from the wedding chamber window. The latch lifted just as heavy as he remembered, and when the door swung open, the trail glowed like the brilliant face of the moon overhead. He shifted the sword into a more comfortable position and began walking.

Trees passed, and so did rock and hillock and a thrushy dell. Finally, the road returned to the climb he had started earlier that day. Before him, the not so distant peaks caught the moonlight in their teeth and did not tremble, nor did he. The path led to them and through them and passed beyond. He leaned into the ascent, his thighs burning familiarly.

So close now to the road’s beginning, so comfortable in the long strides that would eat the miles, so aware of his legs moving him forward, always forward on his comfortable journey into the unknown, he realized the road had no end, and he was content.




ONE IN A THOUSAND


This is a dream!

This is a dream!

I entered the last dream shouting at my sleeping self, aware that I was dreaming. Wake up, fool! I pleaded. I’ll admit it. But I slept on anyway. Some things you just can’t help. Tonight I won’t do it, though. Plead, I mean. Tonight I’ll welcome the dream.

I knew it was a dream, all of them were, because I woke to leave them and slept to enter. But that was the only way I knew. The dreams are reality in all other ways and when I die here I die in my waking life. I saw it happen to a guy once, so I know what I’m talking about.

He stood three men down from me. No name, just another soldier. I’m a soldier, too, in the dreams. Scared looking, but holding himself stiff and straight; he was just one guy in a line of a thousand men and women. I stared straight ahead, but from the corners of my eyes I saw them wearing khaki uniforms, hiking boots, belt buckles shining.

Even in the first dream I started thinking, “How many of these people got what it takes to survive?” This is a kind of fantasy I play by myself. I remember in junior high doing the same thing, looking at a classroom full of kids and wondering who would live if suddenly they were transported to a desert island. I’d pick them out one at a time. “No, not him,” I’d think. “Too weak. Not her either. Not hard- headed enough.”

I picked myself to live.

I was close to the end of the line. The barracks, I thought they were barracks, creaked in the blowing sand fifty yards away. Sand scoured my face, but I didn’t even squint. I learned that the first time I was here. Don’t squint. Don’t relax. Don’t step forward. Don’t talk unless you’re talked to. Let your eyeballs dry out. Stand tall.

I don’t know how many times I’d dreamed about the line when this guy I’m telling you about got his. The sergeant was stalking the line towards me, and I was praying he would stop before he got to me, or walk by, not pause in front of me.

He did once.

“What are you thinking about?” he had asked. His face pushed up under my chin, his breath puffed on my neck.

“Lots of things sir.” My voice didn’t crack. There was no way to know what would be a good answer. He never behaved the same way twice. He was a maniac sometimes, or as reasonable as a judge others, or indifferent, or caring. He changed constantly. Sometimes his voice varied. He spoke in an accent, or hoarse, or falsetto. But his face never changed. It was creased and leathery, an odd shade of brown, not really Chicano or Negro. Something else. And his uniform was always the same, sky blue with a wide black stripe down the sleeves and legs. He might as well have been wearing a black hooded robe though, and carried a scythe, since that is who he was. He didn’t though. The uniform was blue and the boots were brown, and he took long heavy strides in them, for a small man.

He almost always carried something. Once it was a machine gun, the kind I used to see in World War II movies. A Sgt. Rock machine gun. Another time it was a spear, and another time an Eskimo skinning knife. Today it was a little stick, like a straw you’d stick in a malted milk. He pressed it against my chest above my heart.

“Name two,” he said.

“I was thinking how I wished you wouldn’t stop in front of me sir, and I was thinking it is too hot here.” I tried not to lean backwards from the pressure of the stick on my chest, and to do that I had to lean into it, which struck me as exactly like moving into a punch.

He laughed. He did laugh a lot, but it hardly ever meant anything. He laughed the way some people say “um.” It just filled time while he thought of something to say.

“Good answers.” He pulled the stick away and I had to catch myself from falling forward. He turned and walked. That’s the first time I saw the patch on his shoulder. Since then I tried to study it whenever he went by. The patch is gray with a black border, and on the field of gray is the fraction 1/1,000 in black. That’s the other reason I know this is not just a dream. The patch I mean.

That’s what happened when he stopped in front of me, but the time I was telling you about, the time he stopped in front of the guy three men down, he wasn’t carrying anything. Around his lower legs, though, he wore what looked like skinny shin guards, and coming out of the top of each of the guards was an eighteen inch long sabre, curved slightly away from him so when he walked the points wouldn’t stab him. They looked sort of weird sticking up like that, like something you might see on an insect’s leg.

The sergeant started screaming at him. He spit when he screamed, so that at the end his chin shone with the glisten of his saliva. He yelled like a television preacher preaches, putting emphasis in odd places and dragging out some syllables. It all seemed like gibberish these things he yelled, and part of the time I couldn’t tell if he was yelling at the guy, or yelling at himself, or just yelling for the hell of it. I thought for a second maybe that he was even crying.

Then, abruptly, he threw his knee into the abdomen of the man, and the sabre slid in as easily as a boat into harbor. It made a ripping noise, a small one, when it tore his shirt, and then a kind of sloppy wet sound. The guy doubled over the sergeant’s knee and spazzed out for a few seconds, like an epileptic having a seizure, and then he was still. The sergeant had been supporting him by the armpits and he let him down on his back and pulled the blade out. His pant leg was black with blood, and when he walked by me his shoe squished just like he’d accidently stepped in a puddle.

It’s kind of funny. When something happens in a movie, like a guy gets kicked in the nuts, lots of people double over, like they got kicked themselves. Not me. I feel the kick in my foot. People all around me are moaning like they got booted, and I’m thinking how it feels to do the kicking. So this guy down the line gets gored with a mutant shin guard and instead of thinking how bad that’d feel to have happen to me, I’m thinking what it would feel like to do it. Funny, huh?

I saw the guy’s face staring up into the blind sky. I looked at it out of the corner of my eye for a long time, and that’s why I know I can die here, because I saw the same face on the street outside of my apartment the next morning. He’d been hit by a car and his back was twisted around funny, like a busted toy, so that his knees were against the asphalt as if he were kneeling, but his upper torso was on its back on the sidewalk. I had walked out of the door, on my way to the plant, still distracted from the dream, just in time to hear the car hit him. He didn’t make a sound, but the car tires shrieked like a banshee and the driver was out in a second saying it wasn’t his fault; the man was a jaywalker.

I stood there. It was the same guy as from the dream laying in the street. He blinked slowly once, and his lips parted, not to speak but to let a last breath out. The driver was still yelling, and a handful of people stopped to look at him, but no one bent to touch the dead man. For a moment I panicked when I thought the driver might be the sergeant, but he wasn’t. He was a middle-aged fellow, really beefy. His shirt was untucked in the back so it flopped off his big butt as he twirled around assuring everyone in earshot he was innocent. I backed up though when I saw his tatoo, a little one, on his forearm, a black circle around a gray field with a black 1/1,000 in the middle.

I saw that tatoo and my breath kind of froze in my throat, and I ran away just like I’d killed the guy.

Couldn’t work worth a damn. Made lots of mistakes. Couple of the fellows covered for me when I did, because I had for them before. I thought about the dream all the time. I wondered if the dead man had had the same dream the night before, and he knew he died in it. I wondered if he woke up that morning and washed his face, and put on his tie, and kissed his wife goodbye, and patted his kids on the head knowing that it was over.

It’s kind of odd, you know, being afraid of a dream since you can’t do anything about it, though Lord knows I tried. I mean this is going to sound like I just did nothing, like I was a wimp letting this dream push me around, but it wasn’t like that at all. I tried all the time, every night, to not dream. I stayed away from rich food, thinking that might do the trick, but it didn’t. And then I tried dreaming other dreams, dreams I used to have, but they wouldn’t come. So I ended up just letting them do what they wanted because I had no choice.

All the first dreams I stood in the line and he inspected, and paused, walked on, and paused, and killed. Sometimes with just his bare hands. I tried to guess who would go next. Once, way down the line, he reached up to a man’s throat and stood there for ten minutes choking him to death. I could see the hair on the sergeant’s arms, and the muscles underneath straining. And I remember other faces turned to look, like I was, but no one stepped out; they took peeks, so I’d see the face, a flash of eyes, and then I wouldn’t.

It happened slowly. The wind moaned past us, notes rising and falling. Individual grains of sand bounced off my shirt. The sergeant was far away, but I could see those muscles tight under his skin as if I stood beside him. My forearm muscles clenched until they ached from it.

The guy next to me hated the sergeant; I could tell. Hated and feared him. Scared? Oh yeah, I was scared. Who wants to die? But I couldn’t work up any hate for him as much as I tried. So I started to hate myself, for not hating him, I mean. “What kind of man am I?” I thought.

In the beginning when I believed it was just a dream, a bad recurring dream, I guessed it came out of dodging Vietnam. It’s not like I really dodged. I had a high number, but other guys didn’t and they had to go. I stayed home. I would have gone, but my luck was good. So I thought at first that these dreams were like a civilian version of delayed shock syndrome. I was feeling bad from not going over and it showed up in this military nightmare.

Fat chance. As I said, they are real.

Then, we broke formation. He made us march across the desert, and for days (every night) I drug my feet across the sand, and that’s all the dream was, us walking, and him trailing along killing people, maybe a half dozen a night. No reason as far as I could tell unless someone cut from the column. Completely random. Sometimes he’d yell something. Sometimes he was quiet. You’d never know.

I watched the back of the man in front of me. He had a funny rhythm in his walk. He’d take three good strides, and then a short one, always with the left leg. It got hypnotic. I breathed to his walk, three longs and a short, three longs and a short. Sweat lines slid down my back, soaking my belt. My feet burned because the sand held the foot for a second each stride. I counted steps, but only the short ones, and I was almost to 2,500, about six miles I figure if each step was three feet long.

“What you thinking about?” The Sergeant marched beside me, hands hidden behind his back, like this was a stroll in the park. This was the first time he’s spoken to me since I saw the guy in the street, but I didn’t think about that then. My face went dry. It was funny, kind of, how my body showed me I was afraid. All my pores closed up, and my skin got cold, like my body fluids had abandoned me, gone to hide inside. I didn’t blame them.

“Just counting steps.” I had nothing I could say. What did it matter, after all? My dream had a maniac in it who was going to kill me.

“What else?” He sounded like a librarian asking me what books I wanted. Very proper. Very polite.

“I was thinking I don’t want to die yet.”

“No one does, son.” Then he pulled a gun from behind his back, not an ordinary gun, but a massive black hunk of metal with a pistol grip and no barrel at all, pointed it at the man in front of me, and blew a hole in him the size of a pie plate. Almost cut him in half. I skipped sharply to avoid stepping on him. The sand was sprayed red for twenty feet from the body, and the guy I was behind now was soaked in gore, little bits dropping off him as he walked. Blood ran off the palms of his hands. I wondered what it felt like to hold a gun like that, to feel the heavy kick of it.

“He didn’t want to die either,” the sergeant said in his librarian voice as he aimed the gun at me.




Then I woke up, gasping, soaked with sweat, and I realized I’d wet the bed.

I knew I couldn’t go back to sleep, so I scored some whitecross from an old drug buddy of mine and tried to outlast the sergeant.

It was stupid.

Sitting in a back booth of the Dark Horse Bar and Grill seventy-six hours later, with a hundred gallons of coffee and God knows how many amphetamines in my system, I closed my eyes.




“Nobody wants to die,” he said. The sand scrunched loudly under his feet. I stared ahead, but the gun filled my peripheral vision.

“I hate this dream,” I said. He laughed, and it almost was a real laugh, an honest one.

“You shouldn’t.” Then he said a weird thing. I wondered about it. “It’s better than being awake. You should want to stay here all the time.” Then he dropped the gun to his side and disappeared behind me, but I could still hear his chuckle as I walked farther away from him. When his gun’s awful slam echoed flatly across the desert later, and someone else died, I didn’t even flinch.

How could this possibly be better than being awake, this nightmare where people died for no reason, this nightmare that was real? But I didn’t try the uppers trick again. I just went to bed when I was tired and let the dream happen.

We came, I don’t know how many nights later, to the edge of a swamp, all oozy mud and pale sick looking trees falling over on themselves, and he set us to building a road into it. I was in the rock and fill crew. We moved dirt and boulders in wheelbarrows from a quarry a quarter of a mile up a hill to the edge of the marsh, where a second crew dumped it into the muck. Mindless sort of work: lift and carry, lift and carry.

The road stretched into the swamp slowly, night after night. We started moving our loads down to the end of the road we’d made and leaving them there rather than at the edge of the swamp. He kept killing though. Like a jumping spider, he’d be one place, and we’d be working, and all of the sudden he’d be next to somebody and they’d die. We buried the bodies in the road.

I don’t know what I was doing during my waking times. These dreams went on for months. It seems that I did what I always did: went to work, ate meals, talked to my friends, but it was like that was the dream, and dreaming was the reality. I tried to tell a buddy about it, but he got that glassy look in his eyes, like anyone would, when I started going into the details. After all, it was only a dream to him. Everyone has them, he said.

I even went to a psychiatrist, and he at least listened, but when we were all done, he said I needed more sessions, and scheduled me in for twice a week. I told him that at the rate the dream was going I wouldn’t make the second appointment, and he frowned, scribbled a prescription for something and told me to try that. The pharmacist told me that it was a sleeping pill. Great help.

Meanwhile, numbers were getting pretty thin in the dream.

The road reached a couple of hundred yards into the swamp, but there were only eight of us left when I woke up in the dream, exactly where I had been when the dream left off last. He carried a six foot long double bladed ax now, with a little whistle device in the head so that when he swung it, it sang. Gruesome thing, and heavy too. It hardly slowed down passing through a body. I thought of that old horror story with a pendulum in it. This ax could have doubled for the pendulum.

He walked behind me, and my back felt naked. I shoveled more dirt into the wheelbarrow, waiting for the whistle, but it didn’t come for me. All night I loaded dirt and rocks, rolled it to the edge of the road, and dumped it. I imagined what it would be like to be him, to heft that heavy axe, to look at sweaty backs and choose and choose.

When I woke up in the real world (I don’t know. I can’t tell them apart any more. Not that it makes a difference), there were only two of us left and I knew that I would die the next night.

But it was unavoidable. Sleep, I mean. It was like a gigantic cold front moving across the horizon, first showing up as just a hint of darkness, and then towering higher and higher. I remember a picture of a farmer in a field watching a storm come. He is very small in the picture; the wall of blackness bearing down on his field, huge.

I pulled my blankets back, stepped out of my shoes, lay down and closed my eyes. You can’t stop the rain. I started to sleep.

That’s when I yelled “This is a dream! This is a dream!” But it didn’t do any good.

He threw a body into my wheelbarrow, a short woman with black hair. Not a mark on her. Perhaps he just looked at her and wished her dead. I don’t know.

She thumped hard, her head snapping sharply against the edge of the wheelbarrow.

“Put her in the road,” he said. Her hands had draped on the rim like she was going to come to life and pull herself out, like she was resting there and wasn’t really dead. I wondered how she would die in her other life. Maybe a car accident, or on an operating table, or she might just go to sleep and not wake up.

“You killed us all off. The road won’t get finished,” I said.

“The work doesn’t matter,” he said, but his tone was odd, like he was smiling when he said it.

“Was this better than being awake for her?” I was angry. You can’t stay scared forever. For a while I was petrified. He killed up and down the line. I saw death administered hundreds of ways, then, after the uppers incident, I got numb, like death was anything else that happened. It was no different than going to the bowling alley. But now I was mad.

“Of course.”

“She’s dead.”

“That’s true,” he said.

“So how’s that better?” I dropped the handles of the wheelbarrow. Her arms flopped across her chest. He pushed his burnt leather face up to mine, but I didn’t back up. We locked eyes, his watery blue ones with my muddy browns.

“Before, she was always going to die. Here, she had a chance.” His breath washed on my chest. I thought about jumping him—he didn’t carry a weapon today—but I had seen him attacked before, two times. They both died horribly, slowly, in a great deal of pain.

“What chance!” I yelled. It was so stupid. He would kill me, and that would be that.

“The same chance you had, which was better than what you use to have over there in your waking life.”

“What?”

He sat down on a boulder the size of an office desk and crossed his legs under him.

“What do you think life’s about?” he said to me, suddenly angry. “Have you thought for a second what you do anything for?”

I tried to think, but I was too mad. I couldn’t figure what he was getting at, and I wanted to kill him. I’d never have another chance. What did I have to lose? I bunched my fist and slammed it into his throat.

It was like hitting polished marble, like punching a statue. He waited until I quit grimacing. My knuckles should have all been broken, but they weren’t. The skin wasn’t even bruised.

“Don’t you get it?” he said. “I can’t die, and that’s why she’s lucky and so are you.”

I must have looked stupid. “Huh?” I said.

“Nobody used to live,” he said. “You know, it was inevitable. Everybody died. One-hundred percent. But it’s different now. Things have changed here.”

I looked around. Behind him the gray desert hills mounded one on another. Behind me, the incomplete road reached into the swamp like a dock. “Where’s here?” I said.

He shrugged. “All places are the same place. Heaven, I guess, if you want a word. But you’re in it all the time, sleeping or awake.” He put his hand on his leg, fingers wrapped around something. “Only now, not everyone will die. We get to choose a survivor.”

Maybe it was his calmness about our conversation. Maybe I just didn’t have any anger left, but all of the sudden I just felt empty. Everybody in the dream but me was dead. I said, “Before, no matter what I did, I was going to die anyway.” It was more a statement than a question.

“In the end.”

“And now I’m not going to, ever?”

He opened his hand and held it out to me. It was, naturally, the black bordered patch with the gray background. In the middle, in black, 1/1,000.

“No, never.”

He walked away, into the desert, and from the other direction I heard feet marching, a thousand sets of feet. I pinned the patch to my shoulder and waited for the troops.




ROCK HOUSE


From the highway where I parked my car, to the door of Rick’s house, my school-years friend, I climbed a mile of twisting, scrub oak-lined, tree-shrouded path that looked more and more to my satisfaction like an animal track the farther from the highway I traveled. Every foot into the late spring woods was a foot farther from everything else. When the sound of the last diesel truck faded in the leafy rustle, it was as if I had stepped back in time. Tree bark grew rougher, with gaps wide enough to slide my hand into. Roots crossed the trail like great, vegetable veins, and when I stopped the third time to recheck his instructions in the letter I’d received the week earlier, something large and ponderous crushed through the underbrush just out of sight. I stood, my heart paralyzed, his letter fluttering in my fingers, until the heavy snap of branches vanished in the distance and an unafraid mountain jay lighted on a rock near the trail to look me over.

Despite everything, I almost turned around then, but I’d lugged my suitcase so far already.

Rick’s eccentricities drove him to excess when he was young. He’d been a bookish, pale shadow in college. So had his sister, Lynn, but I’d been a reader too, and we’d found camaraderie in our novels, swapping books, discussing imaginary lives between classes. They were trust fund kids, unbound by finances, and their worries were not the world’s worries. By my junior year, I’d fallen in love a little bit with them both, but we didn’t have any classes together my senior year. Lynn grew increasingly quiet and absent in the way pale girls can, and Rick started haunting used bookstores for rare editions, expensive leather-bound volumes with cut edges and sewn in bookmarks. I remember the second to last time we talked. He put an old book with an indecipherable title on the table beside him, which, in idleness, I picked up. He snatched it from my hands, his cheeks suddenly red, like blood under the snow, and I saw in his eyes a rage that frightened me. The next day, he tried to apologize, but all I saw was the rage. His skin became a furnace with it, baking me. We never spoke again, but I passed him or Lynn on the quad every once in a while, and I mourned the darkness in their eyes, the burnished silk of their hair. Few people know books. Few like to talk about them.

So we drifted fifteen years apart, until his letter importuning me to visit, to see the “strange edifice of my rock house home,” as he put it, to “salve his maladies and afflictions.” As misfortune would have it then, time lay heavy on my hands, and my office found me useless. Three weeks vacation and “more if you need it” became my prescription. A week in the mountains with my old friend, Rick, seemed like the best of the bad options. If there was a way to arrange it, I wouldn’t go back. Nothing in the world seemed worth the effort.

Two turns more up the tree-shrouded track, then I came to a small clearing in the woods, thigh-high with alpine grass and spring flowers. After the aged forest’s overhanging gloom, the sudden space should have lightened my spirits, but instead I felt a twinge of agoraphobia, as if the overwhelming branches held me to the Earth, and their disappearance marked the opening of a gate between me and a gray abyss. My stomach rose. I staggered a step before shaking the impression away. His letter said the clearing was his front porch, but it seemed like any other undisturbed forest space. Certainly nothing manmade marked the scene at first. I looked for a minute to find it. The mountain’s shoulder swelled at the clearing’s other side into a black limestone cliff shot through with bright mineral lines. At its base, cut into the stone, stood an entrance, tall and pointed like a medieval cathedral’s, and when I drew close, the grass tips brushing against my fingertips, I saw that the door was stone too with a stone knocker in the center. Grotesque carvings lined the recessed archway, hideous heads no bigger than my fist, all caught in mid grimace, tiny mouths filled with cat teeth and sharp tongues. Human faces, just barely. I smiled at the sight. Rick lived on a better Earth, a literary one, and where I’d failed in my bookish dreams, he’d clearly pressed on.

I used the knocker, the sound no louder than a pebble tapped against a boulder, but a few seconds later, the door drew back.

“Allan, welcome to Rock House,” said Rick, shading his eyes against the clouded sky. “I didn’t realize it was day.” He laughed. “I didn’t realize it was spring.”

He’d become even more slender since school, still as pale, but his face had developed middle-aged character. Distinct lines crossed his forehead. A patrician patina surrounded his mouth. His hand rested on the door’s edge, and he opened it more to let me in as a waft of cool air brushed my face, smelling of dark stone and deep places. Awkwardly, I stepped across the threshold and into the gloom. The door closed behind me.

My eyes adjusted slowly. Thankfully, I put my suitcase down. “That’s a long way to carry groceries.” Two hefty lamps at either end of a dark couch provided the only light. The ceiling was high, maybe twelve feet. Later I would notice the engravings that marked its surface, but now it only seemed black except for a foot-wide crystal vein that meandered diagonally across the room.

“Backpacks are the secret.” Rick gestured toward the couch.

No carpet covered the floor. The same black stone, polished to a glassy sheen, absorbed the light, and although it looked slick enough to reflect an image, I could see nothing of myself within it, not even a shadow. Glad to be done with the uphill climb, I sat. Rick stood beside the couch, his arms crossed, a scattering of nearly white hair falling across his forehead and over his eyes.

“Your house is spectacular.” I turned in my seat. The walls bowed around the room, a rounded square, maybe twenty-five feet from side to side. Tapestries alternated with bare stone. A log smoldered in a niche cut into the wall. “It must have cost a fortune.”

“I had it built.” He leaned against the couch, partly sitting on the arm. For a moment he gazed around the room, perhaps trying to see it as I saw it. “It took time to find the right location.”

“But the effort! How long would something like this take?” I imagined craftsmen dynamiting the cliff face, burrowing into the mountain, and then widening their shaft into this chamber. The floor alone would have taken hundreds of hours to turn from raw rock into a slick black plane. Slowly, out of the darkness, two other doors took shape. It wasn’t just a single room. How big was Rick’s house?

“A project like this never stops. It takes a life of its own.” His voice sounded wan, like his complexion. “Remember, we used to talk about living in stone?” He rested his hand on his knee. “Beautiful, gothic palaces. Wuthering Heights. Prince Prospero’s castle. Gormenghast.” He sighed. “Khazad-dum.”

“So, a nice brick bungalow in the suburbs wouldn’t be enough for you?”

He smiled. “No, not for me. Not for Lynn either.”

I didn’t have time to reply. The shadow that marked the door on the left shifted, and a ghost filled it. I started half from my seat, but then the ghost said in Lynn’s voice, “It’s been a long time, Allan. The sun must be abroad.” I’d almost forgotten how low she spoke. How she drew that contralto note from such a narrow reed, I never knew, but it recalled the nights in her brother’s dorm, the three of us sprawled across his bed on our backs; Rick at one end, listening; Lynn at the other, propped by a pillow, a book in her hand reading out loud. My back against the wall, I crossed the two in the middle, our legs intertwined. I could almost feel Rick’s bare foot braced against my thigh; how Lynn’s leg draped over mine so that when she reached a climactic moment in the story her calf muscle tensed, pulling me closer to her; her voice soothing us both, like a steady wash of waves against a rocky beach. Now, her face and hair reflected the table light perfectly, but from a distance, a far moon behind thin clouds, and her white dress hung from her shoulders to her feet in an unbroken line.

She walked a step closer, and the lunar glow grew stronger. Where Rick had aged, Lynn had improved to lustrousness. She smiled and pushed her hair away from her ears. “Do you want to see the rest?”

The door on the right led to a kitchen and storage room. The chrome surfaces seemed out of place in the stone chamber.

Rick opened a cabinet beside the stove, revealing a large tank. “Propane for cooking and heat, although I prefer the fireplaces. There’s solar panels outside and battery storage for electricity. We have to budget our use, I’m afraid.” He turned off the lights. “We’ve grown used to darkness or candles. Books by candlelight, ah, that is the way they were meant to be read.”

I sighed with content. The empty years after college already were fading. Books, a comfortable chair, and people to talk to about them.

Lynn excused herself when we entered the other hallway. Her fingers grazed my cheek. “It’s really good to see you again, Allan.” She entered the first room before closing a door behind her.

Rick grimaced, his emotions hard to discern in the hallway’s dim ceiling light. “She’s not totally… healthy. She tires, I’m afraid. We both do.”

I touched my cheek. The year after college I’d taken up with a goth girl who looked somewhat like Lynn, except with black lipstick and multiple piercings. The same slenderness. A passing resemblance in her eyes and hair, but the relationship was a failure. She didn’t read beyond Anne Rice. She felt lovemaking was too earthy, too mundane, below her ideas about death, decay and her fascination with vampires. I tried, but I couldn’t picture Lynn when I was with her. The few times she consented, it was an act of quid pro quo, a straight exchange of services. She liked me to drive to a cemetery where I could go down on her in the car’s backseat, the windows open so the cut grass and freshly turned dirt smells would fill her nose. She longed to couple on a fresh grave or in a tomb, but I was too squeamish. Her voice was wrong. She was not Lynn.

Rick opened a second door. Beyond him, the light didn’t show more of the hallway than a few feet.

“You said in your letter that you weren’t doing well. Something about ‘afflictions?’”

“Yes.” A switch clicked on. “This is the guest bedroom. I hope it’s comfortable enough for you.” A bedside light on a small stand showed a bed, a bureau and a chair. Like the front room, tapestries hung from the ceiling to cover the walls. “Afflicted, did I say that? I suppose I am.”

“You said maladies, too.” I shivered. Away from the fireplace, the air bit with cave cold. I wondered if I had packed a sweater. A thick, folded quilt covered the foot end of the bed.

Two other doors opened into bedrooms. The next revealed a bathroom, where both the toilet and the sink had been shaped directly from rock. A black curtain covered the shower. I didn’t realize the bathroom had a mirror until I stepped in front of the sink, where my own face startled me.

“How many square feet?” I still couldn’t see the hallway’s end.

“Two thousand, originally.” He sounded ironic. “Now, I’ve lost track.”

The heart of Rick’s house came at the last door. Another peaked cathedral arch like the front entrance waited, but this was unadorned, and our footsteps echoed when we entered. Rick turned on a single lamp on a reading table flanked by two soft-looking chairs. Its weak rays barely reached the walls, twenty feet away, and what they illuminated were books on shelves all the way around the room. A ladder attached to a rail fifteen feet above and mounted on wheels below provided access to the higher volumes. My breath caught in my throat. Books filled every space, all leather-bound, and rarities, no doubt. Their smell filled the air, parchment and ink and binding glues.

“My library.” Rick waved his hand. “It and this house have been my life’s work.”

The books’ spines felt cool across my palm. They were solidly packed from end to end. I saw no place to add a new acquisition.

Rick stood beside me. “Here’s an oddity.” He took a book from a shelf above his head. “Look at this one.”

Its brown cover had no title. I moved to the light, but when I tried to open it, the pages stuck at the bottom as if glued. “It’s damaged.” I held it out to him.

“No, not really. Look at the edge.”

I turned the book on end. The bottom pages didn’t look like paper at all. The surface was slick, and it clicked against my fingernail.

“Fossilization takes centuries, they say. Water carries dissolved minerals, and the minerals displace the organic material, cell by cell, so thousands of years later we can find complete trunks from ancient trees. Perfectly duplicated leaves in stone.” He took the book back. “We find the dinosaurs, even, revealed in rock’s slow triumph. Stone echoes.”

“But it is, as you say, a gradual process. You can’t be implying that your book is turning into a fossil.”

“It has been on that shelf for fourteen months. Some of the titles have become… permanent, a part of the wall and shelf. The shelves themselves.” He shrugged. “I’m not sad about it. There’s a poetry here. If the trend continues, my library will always exist. I only read the same one or two of them anymore anyway.” His tone became wistful. “Mostly I like to come in here and sit with the books around me.”

I shivered again, but not from the cold.

“You must see this, though, at the back of the library.”

He led me to a narrow exit surrounded by shelves, but it didn’t look like the other doors in the house, although its top led to a point too. The edges were rolled and smooth, more like flesh than stone, and a damp seep glistened on the surface. Rick handed me a flashlight. “The electrical lines don’t go this far.”

I had to rotate my shoulders to squeeze through the door, and the wet stone moistened my shirt. The flashlight cut a clear shaft in the darkness to reveal the library floor’s perfect plane broken into gentle corrugations, and instead of walls, long, natural stone columns connecting the floor to the ceiling. Tan stone replaced the black. “You broke into a cave?”

“I don’t think so. I only discovered this a few weeks ago. It wasn’t as large then.”

“What do you mean?” The light played across the ceiling, catching water drops in brilliant flashes dangling from stalactite teeth.

“I mean, this room is new. It didn’t exist when I finished the house.”

When I turned, the flashlight changed his face into a landscape of bright whites and shadows. “I don’t understand.”

He walked into the strange room, dragging his hands across the stone on either side, past me so that he stood near the middle. “This is the affliction I wrote you about. My malady. My evolving rock house.”

“Jesus, Rick.” A water drop released from the ceiling, caught the flashlight’s beam for a glittering instant, then plinked loudly like a glass bell into a shallow pool. “What can I do? Why did you ask me to come?”

He looked at me intently. “We ended on some awkwardness, I remember. I’ve always been sorry for that. It was my jealous soul.”

I couldn’t think of an adequate reply. A straightforward apology left me uncomfortable. “Are there bats, too?”

Rick shook his head.

He pointed his flashlight at his feet. The pool picked up the glare. It was if he stood on a radiant platform. “You have the imagination for it. I would have thought of you, eventually, but it was Lynn’s idea. She asked me to write.”

After much conversation, I grew too tired to talk. Most of the time he sat on his library chair, a book unopened in his lap. He’d lit a candle and turned out the lamp. I sat with him next to that flickering flame, reminiscing about the books we’d read in college. It made me happy to talk with him again, like those times when all that mattered were our thoughts and interpretations, when we considered ourselves a part of the literary elite, polishing off volume after volume, washing them down with wine and talk and long passing nights listening to Lynn read. I thought again of her leg draped over mine and the small contractions in her calf as her speech bathed us, of the intensity in her gaze moving from word to word. She kissed me goodnight the last time we read together, at the door of Rick’s room. It was the only time. The next day was when Rick grew so angry about the antique book.

Lynn had asked for me!

When I couldn’t hold my eyes open any longer, I excused myself to my room. It wasn’t until I was in bed that I looked at my watch. It was only 6:30 p.m. I turned the light out.

The darkness descended. Nothing else describes it. Lying in bed, the quilt pulled to my chin, the utter blackness of a cave enveloped me. My eyes strained to see anything, vainly, waited to adjust to the darkness, but there was nothing to adjust to, and for the first time since I had entered Rick’s rock house, the weight of the mountain above me made its presence known. The quiet, too, was utter. No click of a clock. No whisper of air conditioning. No refrigerator buzz. Nothing except the rush of my own pulse in my ears, and soon I couldn’t hear that. I held my breath in the silence. Finally, I felt on the table beside the bed for my watch. The tiny green light exploded behind the time: 6:43. It winked out. I pressed it again just to see the hopeful green planet swimming in the unlit space. But when I pressed a third time, the light shone dimmer, and on the last press, the light barely came on before fading to nothing. My battery had died. Sadly, I put the watch back on the table. It felt cowardly to turn the table light on, and Rick had said they budgeted the electricity.

Once, when I was a child, I’d gone on a cave tour with my father. The guide stopped us in a curved hallway, and then he turned out the lights. He said, “This is what a blind man sees every day of his life.” Delighted at first, I wiggled my fingers in front of my face, but the guide kept the lights off for too long. I pressed against the wall, trying to grow small, too afraid to reach for my father. My heart stuttered. Then, something touched the back of my neck.

Later, they told me I had had a seizure.

I don’t know. I don’t remember that part, but it seemed to me, in the instant before all memory fled, something whispered in my ear, its talon on my neck, sharp nail against my skin, teeth clicking together, an airy whisper saying things I didn’t want to understand.

Now, in the room’s darkness, I lay still for a minute, an hour, a night. Who could guess how long? It seemed, bizarrely, as if the bed were slowly spinning. I tried counting breaths, and wondered if I would be able to tell the difference between being awake in the lightless room or asleep in a lightless dream.

Then, I did hear a noise, a slippery creep that could have been nothing, the sound of a single hair in my ear brushing against another, or the near undetectable rush of a lone drop of water running down the wall, but it repeated. Something was in my room. I became a child again as the steps approached my bed, singular, each, and loud now that came toward me, until they must be at my bed’s side. Then, a touch against the quilt. A silky swish of something brushing toward my face.

My heart, my chest, the muscles of my neck, tensed so I thought I would burst. My back arched slightly as my body clenched. I couldn’t scream or voluntarily move. Maybe I whimpered. I’m not proud of it, but the darkness like that, and the sound in the black. Then, a warm caress on my face, a warm breath of air against my lips. Lips on my lips. It took me a second to react, to realize the tongue seeking mine was real and human. I reached out from under the quilt to find an arm, and my fingers moved up to wrap in long hair. The lips pulled away. Cloth rustled. Soft clothes dropped to the floor. The quilt lifted to let in a cool draft, and the bed rocked. Knees bumped knees. The kiss again. I caressed her, slid down to the hip’s fine curve and pulled her toward me.

In that total dark, only the baby seal feel of her skin on mine existed. Only her exhalations, warm and explosive against my neck. Only the taste of her mouth, the sweat on her face. Only her fertile smell. We could have been floating above a desert or marooned at sea or on an arena’s wide-open floor.

Some time later, her leg still draped over my stomach, her head on my shoulder and my hand on the small of her back, my breath at last slowed to normal. I broke the peace. “After all these years, why now?”

She kissed the underside of my chin, then moved her hand between her thigh and my stomach, down until she held me again, and soon, much sooner than I would have believed possible, I stirred. She levered herself back into position, supple as an eel, but this time my senses expanded beyond the languid cavort beneath the quilt, beyond my hands gliding from sweat-slick shoulder blades to curving back, beyond our consuming mouths, to the room’s stone walls, as if our gasping breath served as a bat’s sonar, sending signals back to me. I sensed the room and the halls and the moisture trapped in the rocks, and a liquid, mineral sentience around us, listening and urging, greedily absorbing, until, behind that, I felt a brooding overwhelming possessiveness. The walls of Rick’s rock house became quiveringly alive, dampness flushed, as if the mountain was reaching into the room, guiding us, huge limestone fingers holding us together, connecting us so firmly and deeply and singly that I thought we had become just one orgasmic being. For an instant I tried to slide out from under Lynn, from under the mountain, but the feeling was too strong, too good, too frightening, and the second time with her it was if my skull emptied out along with everything else.

When it ended, Lynn stroked my chest. Her damp hair stuck to the side of my face. She spoke. “You ask why now?” I listened to the empty room, just as sightless, but the mountain had retreated, and I felt we were alone. She said, “Nostalgia, maybe.” Her palm lay still on my heart. “I needed a change.” As quietly as she had entered, she left, navigating from the black room by feel or memory.

She’d said, “nostalgia,” but we’d never been lovers before. Nostalgia for what? I wondered. But I didn’t think about it long; I could still feel her skin against my hand, the touch of her lips under my chin. The sheets were clingy with our sweat.

I don’t know how long I was awake after that sleep before I realized it. What I noticed was a swelling of passing candlelight under my door, spreading long yellow fingers that crept across the floor before vanishing, and I felt as if I had slept for some time. I didn’t stir at first. The stately wash of light crossing the stone produced a strong déjà vu, like this wasn’t the first passing of the light, as if this was a routine for me.

Turning the light on, I got out of bed. Goosebumps prickled my legs as I pulled on my socks, but even with them, a cool draft I hadn’t noticed the night before crossed my ankles. Fully dressed, wearing both my sweatshirts, I followed the draft to one of the tapestries. The heavy fabric pulled aside reluctantly, the bottom edge of the cloth no longer cloth at all, but solid rock. At the base of the wall, a ragged hole a foot across blew a steady breeze. The room light didn’t reveal anything past the first foot, but the small tunnel sloped down from the floor. Roomy for a rat; too small for a person.

My watch truly had died. I wondered about the time.

Rick sat in the kitchen with a candle next to his plate. “Nothing tastes good to me anymore.” He pushed a spoonful of eggs from one side to the other. “But I’m never hungry, anyway.” I took a chair on the other side. He looked at me for a long time. “My tastes have grown too sensitive, perhaps. All my senses feel acute.”

I asked him about the hole in my room, but he shrugged his shoulders once, as if to say there was nothing he could do about it.

He dropped his fork onto the table. “Do you remember how we used to talk about living in castles?”

I nodded. “Great stories in castles.”

“It’s the stone. The people are impermanent, but the stone lasts. That’s why they were given names. There were other features too.”

“Drafts.”

“People hiding behind the arras.”

I thought about the tapestries hanging in my room. With the lights out, a voyeur wouldn’t need to hide behind them. He could stand right beside my bed. “Poor Polonius,” I ventured, uncertainly.

“Noises, too. No conspiracy would be safe in a castle. The quietist breath around a corner, down the hall, behind a closed door, might echo to the king’s ears. The acoustics can be unpredictable.”

Maybe he had a point he was trying to make with this conversation, but with the memory of my and Lynn’s throaty gasps so fresh in my ear, I didn’t want to know. I left the table and opened a cupboard beside the sink. “Do you have any bread?”

“It’s gone bad. Canned goods or the refrigerator are all I have to offer.”

Lynn drifted into the kitchen, her white dress brushing against the floor. In the candlelight, I couldn’t tell if she looked at me or not as she sat. Rick took her hand, kissed her knuckles, “You’re wasting.”

“Aren’t we all?” She took a pinch of Rick’s eggs from his plate and put it in her mouth.

An orange in the bottom refrigerator drawer would do for a breakfast. “I’m chilled. I think I’ll eat by the fireplace.”

“We’ll join you.” Rick stood, still holding Lynn’s hand.

The fire had died, but soon a couple good sized logs were blazing, warming my shins and face. Ruddy light illuminated the room better than the table lamps. Medieval images decorated the tapestries: knights, castles, banquets, stylized dragons, horses, grain tied in vertical bundles, and the images continued onto the ceiling, etched deeply, but they were black on black, so only the contrast of the fire-lit surfaces to the unlit grooves revealed them at all.

Rick and Lynn took seats farther away. I wondered if the fire’s heat reached them. Lynn seemed paler than yesterday, if that were possible. Dark circles underscored her eyes. “Man’s relationship to stone goes way back.”

Rick nodded, as if this were a continued conversation. “I like Lot’s wife. That was a fitting reward.”

I ventured, “Didn’t she turn into a salt pillar?”

Lynn sniffed. “Too bad about that. The first rain must have dissolved her into a puddle. Tokien’s stone trolls. Rain and wind wouldn’t touch them.”

“Ah, yes, and Ozmandias, King of kings. Time consumed his kingdom, but his statue remained.”

Lynn closed her eyes. “The Easter Island heads. I love a good megalith.”

“They’re everywhere.” Rick pushed his chair closer to Lynn so he could put his arm around her shoulders. She leaned into him, and his fingers wrapped around her upper arm. It was not a brotherly embrace. “Stonehenge, Carnac, over 50,000 megaliths in Europe alone.”

A log popped loudly, shooting a spark onto the floor. It pulsed a deep heart red for a minute before winking out, and it made me sad. “What time is it?”

Rick laughed, as if I’d finally asked the right question. “It’s our time, of course.”

Lynn nodded. “Our time, yes. The stone age.”

With the firelight on their white faces, on Lynn’s white dress, they looked more like statuary than people.

“No, I mean time of day.”

Lynn sighed in disappointment. “Oh, I thought you meant…” She disentangled Rick’s arm from her shoulder. “We don’t open the door. Sun, moon, stars and clocks don’t matter anymore. That’s the beauty of Rock House. That and the books. I don’t know what season it is.” She yawned. “I woke too soon. I’m going back to bed.”

“It’s late spring.” Suddenly it occurred to me that I couldn’t remember if I’d slept only once in their house, of if I’d slept several times. It was disorienting. “Do you know now long I’ve been here?”

Lynn looked at me from the doorway, her face a pale wisp in the shadow. “You have always been here in a way.”

Rick stared into the fire until the top log burned through and fell in two pieces, scattering a dozen glowing coals across the stone. He started, as if out of deep thought. “Let’s go look at the tunnel you discovered.”

He picked up a flashlight in the kitchen and soon crouched on the floor behind my room’s tapestry. “I never visit in here. Really, with the way things are, I should inspect every day.”

“What do you think is happening?”

He shined the light down the hole. “A thing of beauty, surely.”

I fell to my knees beside him. The light didn’t reach the tunnel’s end.

“I thought you said it was too small to go through.” Rick scrunched his shoulders together and squeezed part of his body into the hole. “I’ll bet I could skinny down this.”

My hand fit in the gap between his back and the top of the hole. “It was smaller earlier.”

He wiggled out, then turned so he rested against the wall. “I’ll stay here for a while. If I sit quietly long enough, I hear things. Maybe I’ll hear the mountain changing.” He smiled. “I’m feeling a bit tired anyway.”

Rick placed his hands flat on the cool floor and leaned his head back. I realized he wore the thinnest of shirts, the collar open to mid- chest. How could he not be cold? His eyes were shut, and he looked nearly asleep already.

“I’ll peruse your library for a bit.”

Rick nodded.

I took a candle with me down the hall and through the library’s arched door. After some searching, I found a copy of an old favorite, Lud in the Mist. The chairs were as comfortable as they looked. The candle cast a bright light from the table. Soon I was deep into the book, reading each page by yellow glow, holding my finger under the next, ready to turn. From the other chamber, the gentle chime of water dripping into the pool provided a jeweled rhythm, steady and clean. From time to time, I caught myself nodding before reading on.

When the candle burnt down to the nub, I lit another, and after what seemed like no time at all, another one. Page after page turned weightlessly, and it seemed as if I’d been reading Lud in the Mist all my life, as if I’d reached the last page just to flip back to the beginning again. Somewhere in there, I slept, then woke to the library’s total blackness, but the weight of the book was comforting on my lap, and water dripping from stone onto stone didn’t sound intimidating at all. When I lit the next candle, I saw many stubs on the table top, their burnt wicks caught in the last smears of wax. I brought my hand before my face. My fingernails were longer than I ever remembered seeing them.

I put the book aside. My back cracked a dozen times when I stood, and both knees popped on their first steps. The candle cast a globe around me, wavering in Rock House’s drafts. A few clicks of the hallway switch on the moisture-coated wall were futile. A drip fell on my wrist. I held the candle high. On the ceiling above the light switch, a stalactite several inches long glistened; beyond that, droplets clung to the ceiling as far as the light reached. The floor felt as if it had a slight tilt to the left, and the corners that had looked so square and keenly hewed from the rock in my memory seemed rougher. The hallway didn’t look as much like a hallway now as it looked like a passageway.

The light switch in my room was no good either.

The tough parts of walking with a bare candle for illumination are that every little breath threatens to puff it out, and that the light shines directly back into the eyes. I cupped my free hand behind the flame to protect it and to shield myself. A breeze flowed from the hole in my wall, where the tapestry had flopped back into position, although the air pressure held it away from the wall. Rick’s legs stuck out from under it.

I tried to speak, but my voice croaked like a rusty pipe instead. I coughed, then tried again. “Have you heard the mountain changing?” The question didn’t have the feel of a joke.

Rick didn’t answer, and when I crouched beside him, my candle nearly guttered out. I put my hand on his leg. The hard surface cooled my hand. Already mourning, I pulled the tapestry away. Rick’s eyes were closed. His skin had taken on the same shade as the stone in his new library room, which meant, if anything, he had gained color. Reluctantly, I touched his face. As hard as the rock it had become, an incredibly detailed and expression-filled rendering of my old friend, his head leaning back, tilted just a touch to the side, as if he’d fallen asleep while sitting there. The wall behind him held him tight, and his legs had melded to the stone floor.

“Ah, Rick.” Suddenly exhausted, I sat at his feet, the heavy tapestry resting against my back. Soon, water drips soaked my sweatshirts. I could almost feel the hungry minerals looking for a way into my skin, to begin the molecule-by-molecule replacement. All I needed was to sit and let it happen. The thought of it was attractive, to sit, to gain respite, to put all things aside. This was the first of three temptations.

Beside him, the hole in the wall had widened to almost my height, peaked at the top like the library door. The tunnel sloped just as steeply, but now the candle illuminated a set of steps leading away. Rousing myself, I stood on the top stair. I had never felt an invitation more clearly. “Come down,” it said, and it would be so easy to slip from one step to the next, easing ever deeper into the earth, until the entrance behind would be long forgotten, and the journey in became all that there was. The voice called within me. I even took another step down, so that it seemed the rock trembled, while the limestone stairs became more slippery. In that sedimentary air, I smelled the fecundness of an ocean, the hidden underside of the bowl that held the sea, filled with seaweed and fish flesh. What waited at the bottom of that long descent? What lay at the root of the world? But I turned away from this second temptation to flee the room. The last I saw of Rick were his feet poking out from under the solid tapestry, never to move again.

Which brought me to Lynn’s room. I should have been thinking of how she would respond to her brother’s fate, but I wasn’t sound anymore. Rock House felt like a drowsy hallucination with all the logic of a daydream. I thought of warm afternoons on the summer porch, drifting to sleep with bees in the background, where my imagination lifted anchor and anything could happen, except here was no sun other than the tiny one balanced on my candle’s wick, and no warmth to relax into. Instead, I was eager to see her so I could share her thoughts on stone that changed and on a brother who had joined it. Only Lynn and Lynn’s voice offered a counter to the mountain’s offer. She, who walked undaunted in the perpetual night, might help me to understand.

And she waited for me, awake on her bed, lying on her back, a nearly translucent sheet covering her. She didn’t blink against the light. “I hoped you would come, Allan.” Her low voice lingered in the air. “I knew you would be on time.”

“What time, Lynn? In time for what?”

“To make it complete. Immortality is possible, but loneliness would be certain if you were not here.”

Confused, I moved next to her on the bed. Candlelight penetrated her sheet, revealing her without uncovering. Here, too, the ceiling dripped. A drop hit the sheet, soaked in. Her skin, where it touched the wet fabric, showed through.

“Be with me,” she said, “and I will stay unafraid.” Other than her eyes and mouth, she hadn’t moved. “Did I ever tell you who my favorite characters in all of literature are?”

I put my hand on her arm. It was reassuringly soft. “Aren’t you cold?”

“This is my temperature, now. I have… grown accustomed to it.”

Her lips were colorless with chill. I wrapped my palm around the side of her face. Her jaw moved under my hand. Her gaze shifted to meet mine. I smiled. “No, you never told me your favorite characters.”

Then I noticed her hair. The candlelight revealed so little, but when I shifted to caress her face, the light fell on her hair spread across her pillow. They were one. The bed, the pillow, her hair had turned to stone. The side of her face, where my fingers rested, shifted. Skin grew solid. Below the syncopated patter of water dripping everywhere, I could hear her body changing, like ice crackling in a cup.

“Medusa and her two sisters. The Gorgons were misunderstood.” Her breath grew short. “It’s not too late, Allan. Embrace me now. Be with me, and we will be eternal.”

The third temptation: a single move, and the intervening sheet would be gone. I could cover her, and my hardness would meet hers, forever. No more fleshy disappointments. No blind stumbling among the blind who didn’t recognize the world they lived in. No reading books that none understood or talked of or cared about. It could be all Lynn and stone and our glittering underground world. I could see it now: we’d become the castle walls that stand long after the defenders have left the ramparts, the darkling cave that held dragons, the tall rocks at Stonehenge, all everlasting. I could be like that too with Lynn, an unseen monument to literature and love. Might someone stumble upon us in a far future? What would they make of the lovers’ statue?

I could choose to be immortal and unchanging, or I could stay among the flawed, the human.

Stone crept across the side or her mouth. “Quick,” she whispered. Then an eye glazed over, and what once was liquid and living stilled. I tried to squeeze her hand, to communicate what I couldn’t say and what she couldn’t hear, now, but her hands had already gone rigid. My heart froze. I might as well have turned to stone for the little I did in Lynn’s last moments with me. At the end, her sheet crystallized. With a touch, it shattered, leaving Lynn on her bed, waiting for me to join her for all time. The empress of limestone.

Finally, the grief drove me out of her room and out of Rock House. The front door gave way stiffly, reluctantly. Outside, a hard winter sun glared off an unbroken snow field. My eyes burned and watered. I covered them for minutes before I could look upon the sunlit world. Across the snow, trees’ bare limbs rattled in the wind. Late spring had become winter.

I waded into the snow.

A year later, I looked for Rock House again. Underbrush choked the trail so I made a dozen bad turns, but when I came to the clearing, there was no door. Just rough stone, cool even on a hot, summer day. I rested my face against the hard surface. The rock wall would last as long as time, as long as Rick and Lynn.

In silence, the mountain neither praised nor condemned. It only stood, like those great immortal books that Rick and Lynn and I read late at night, night after night, intertwined on his bed. All those marvelous authors whose works became human monuments. They would survive forever. So, with my fragile flesh pressed against the unmoving stone, I couldn’t help feeling that hesitation stole my choice. My chance to last had passed.

Behind me, the sun heated the waving grass. Trees creaked and leaves brushed against one another in an unceasing whisper. All living, living until winter came and stilled them, living until new grass and leaves and trees replaced them, temporary, fleshy and weak. Pretty in the sad way a soap bubble buoyed in the wind is pretty, catching the light until it pops.

I trudged away from Rock House, deeper and deeper into the living land, empty of all hope.

If you can, some time, rest your hand on a castle wall. Touch a statue. Pick up a round rock from a river and put it in your pocket.

Only stone goes on.




MRS. HATCHER’S EVALUATION


Yesterday’s conversation with Principal Wahr kept Vice Principal Salas awake all night. “We need to cut the dead weight, Salas. Those teachers who aren’t on board with the new curriculum will be moved out, and I want them moved out immediately.” Wahr, a skinny man with just the barest wisps of white hair on an otherwise bald head, kept one hand on his keyboard and the other on his phone. As he talked, he studied his computer screen which Salas couldn’t see. “Hatcher’s the worst. She ignores the lesson plan template we instituted last year. She doesn’t write her objectives on the board for the students to see, and I’ve sat in her class. Lecture from the tardy bell to the dismissal bell. She’s a dinosaur. I’m adding her to your evaluations. Vice Principal Leanny has ignored Hatcher’s performance forever. We need fresh eyes on her.”

“I haven’t heard anything bad about Hatcher,” said Salas. “She earned teacher of the year two years ago.”

“Popular student vote. Doesn’t mean squat.” Wahr leaned forward. “Here’s how I know she needs to go. My son is going to be a freshman next year, and I don’t want him in her class. Best practice, Salas. We’re a ‘best practice’ school, and all the studies say lecture doesn’t work in social studies.” Wahr turned his attention back to the computer screen, then tapped a couple keys. “Watch her. I’ve got to eliminate a teaching position, and now that the state has removed tenure protection, she’s the best candidate. Here’s two other possibilities. You’re doing their evaluations now.” Wahr dropped file folders on the desk between them. “Evaluate and choose. Somebody’s got to go. Budget, Salas. Budget and best practice.”

He knew Hatcher, a pleasant, older woman, tending toward fat, who looked like Salas’s grandmother. He’d never observed her teaching, though. That night, as the moon moved a tree’s shadow across his bedroom wall, Salas realized he’d have to start Hatcher’s evaluation immediately. He’d get notes from Leanny, then drop in to Hatcher’s last period American History class.

Vice Principal Salas organized his day by piles. The tallish one on the left contained discipline action sheets for students in trouble, many for attendance issues, but also for cell phones in the classroom, smoking, drugs, insubordination, and one for a Theodore Remmick, a freshman who’d brought a small propane torch to school in his backpack. Parent contact sheets made the middle pile. He spent most days on the phone talking to parents, often about the first stack. Teacher evaluations made up the third pile. Much of the time he avoided the third pile. He’d been vice principal at Hareton High for fourteen years, and he knew all the teachers. If they weren’t sending kids for discipline (which meant they weren’t good at classroom management), then he limited his contact with them to drop in visits while they were teaching. Salas evaluated the N-Z teachers. Leanny handled the other half of the alphabet.

Salas dreaded evaluations. Before he’d taken the vice principal job, he’d taught four P.E. classes and one Remedial Reading (his minor had been English), so he felt silly trying to evaluate the academic disciplines. He’d gone into P.E. because he liked sports and kids. He’d been an indifferent student himself.

“Hi, Salas. What did you need?” Vice Principal Leanny leaned into his office without stepping in, her gray-rooted dark hair pulled into a ponytail. She’d started teaching French and Spanish the same year Hatcher joined the faculty, but moved into administration after ten years. With Jack Quinn’s retirement from tech ed three years ago, the two women were the longest tenured employees in the building and old friends.

“What can you tell me about Mrs. Hatcher?”

Leanny grimaced. “Wahr’s after her, isn’t he? It’s not the first time. Best teacher we have. I don’t know why Wahr wants to mix up the evaluations. I’ve been giving her exemplaries as long as I can remember.”

“No one gets exemplaries!” Wahr had directed them not to give teachers the highest rating. He had said, “Everyone can get better. Besides, if we give a teacher the highest rating, it’s hard to fire him.”

“I know. Wahr has a fit.”

Salas said, “I heard she ignores the curriculum and just lectures. That doesn’t sound good.”

“You haven’t observed her, have you? Don’t do a drive by. Give her a half hour.”

“Can you send me your notes on her for this year? I need to get up to speed.”

“Sure. Check your e-mail later.” Leanny rubbed her forehead, as if she had a headache. “Theodore Remmick is waiting outside. Is he for you? His family lives on my street. They’re a piece of work.”

Salas sighed. “Yeah, send him in.”

“By the way, I heard you’re Wahr’s hit man now.”

“What?” He glanced guiltily at the folders the principal had given him.

“Wahr hands that duty off. He’s never fired anyone. The last time the school lost teachers, he gave it to the head counselor. Sorry it’s you. The counselor quit the next year. He worried he’d be asked to do it again.”

Salas shrugged. “What are you going to do? Send Remmick in, would you?”

Theodore Remmick has to be the smallest boy in the freshman class, thought Salas. The boy’s feet hovered above the floor as he sat in the chair by the round table where Salas talked to the discipline problems. Remmick’s nose was narrow, and his hair hung over his eyes as he looked down.

“Why a propane torch?” said Salas. “What were you going to do with it?”

Remmick said, “Did you know a cow didn’t kick over a lantern in the O’Leary’s barn to start the Chicago fire in 1871? Some newspaper guy invented the story to sell papers.” Remmick smiled without looking up. “Like a fire that killed 300 people needed a fabrication to be more interesting.”

Salas paused. Sometimes a kid would deny the accusation. Sometimes he rationalized or defended, or he wouldn’t speak at all. Talking nonsense introduced a new tactic.

“You know, a propane torch is a safety issue.”

“The fire burned so hot the roofs blocks away caught fire before the flames reached them. The fire jumped the Chicago River. That’s a big river. And it kept going. Started on Sunday morning and didn’t stop until Monday evening when the wind died and it rained.”

“What does this have to do with a propane torch? Were you going to burn something?”

Remmick brushed the hair off his forehead. His eyes were brown and clear. “From Lake Michigan’s shore, the sky above the city turned orange. Thousands of people fled to the lake. I saw flame tornadoes rising through the smoke, and it roared like a train.” He closed his eyes as if feeling heat on his face.

“Son, why’d you bring a propane torch to school?” Salas put the torch on his desk. It was tiny, a hobbiest’s tool, not much larger than a cigarette lighter.

“Project for class. Can I go now? I’m missing band.” He squirmed in his seat.

Salas looked at the boy thoughtfully. “They don’t have torches in the shop?”

“I’m not in shop. History. It’s a group assignment. I volunteered it.”

The discipline guide for the district didn’t list a propane torch in any category, so Salas decided to lump it under “item inappropriate for a school setting” on the action sheet. “A week lunch detention, and any project in the future that involves flame or explosions, assume you can’t do it.”

Remmick hopped from the chair, and then offered Salas his hand. “Thank you, Mr. Salas. I’ll keep it in mind.”

When the boy left, Salas shook his head. I could write a book, he thought for the umpteenth time in his education career.




The History department head, Mr. Young, really was young. The wall posters still hadn’t yellowed, and he flinched when he saw Salas at the door: a classic, inexperienced reaction. He had become the department head by arriving late at the meeting last spring, when the history teachers voted on who would attend the extra meetings and take charge of the departmental paperwork.

“According to the district pacing guidelines, the American History classes should be looking at the causes of WWI. If she’s only to 1871, she’s almost a half century behind.” Young ran his finger down the teaching objectives for the class. “They should know mutual defense alliances, nationalism, militarism and imperialism, and from the unit they will be able to discuss America’s emergence as a military and industrial power. They only get a week. We have to be to the Cold War by April’s end or the first week in May.” He thumbed open a section in the notebook. “We have two required benchmarks for the unit: a multiple choice test and a short essay question. I have the rubric for the essay if you’d like to see it.”

Salas tried to look interested. He remembered being 15 himself and his own tour through American History. He recalled biplanes from WWI, but nothing else, which made him think about Snoopy vs. the Red Baron. Of the classes he’d hated, history bored him the most. If it weren’t for sports eligibility, he’d never be motivated to pass.

Salas almost asked Young what he thought of Mrs. Hatcher, but he didn’t want to start rumors.

From the back, Hatcher’s classroom looked like most social studies rooms. She’d covered one wall in maps. Presidents and historical scenes covered the other wall. A long whiteboard stretched across the front. Book-filled cabinets stood behind him. He smelled dry erase markers and carpet cleaner as he leveraged himself into a student desk the right size for a 6


 grader, maybe, but not comfortable for an adult.

Mrs. Hatcher stood beside her desk at the front, straightening papers—she’d waved when he walked in. Salas filled in the preliminary observations on the evaluation check list. Although Hatcher did have writing on her white board, Salas didn’t understand it. In one column were names: “DeKoven, Meagher, Catherine, Barber.” Then some presidents: “Harrison, Jackson, Adams, Monroe” Then some states: “Michigan, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Ontario.” Salas was pretty sure Ontario was in Canada. She’d written one sentence on the board: “It ends at Fullerton Ave.”

What Hatcher had not written were the class learning targets, which were required. Somewhere she should have posted what teaching standards the students were addressing for the day, and what they should be expected to do when the lesson ended. Salas had the WWI standards Young had given him, including, “I will be able to explain why America became involved in the First World War.”

Students trickled into the room, taking desks around Salas. Theodore Remmick came in, nodded in Salas’s direction, then found his place. A dark-haired girl who clearly didn’t know the dress code, dressed showing too much skin, sat in the desk in front of him. “You look pretty mature to be a freshman,” she said.

“Just a visit,” said Salas.

The tardy bell rang. Salas waited for tardy students so he could record Hatcher’s procedure with them, but students filled all the desks, and there were no tardies. Conversation buzzed in the room.

Hatcher started speaking without asking for the students to quit talking. Salas gave her a low mark in the “Commands student attention before beginning instruction” category.

“We’ve moved the Chicago Fire project to Saturday.” By the time she said “Saturday,” the room had grown quiet. “Can somebody bring a big box fan? I’ll provide the extension cord.”

A boy sitting underneath the covered wagons poster raised his hand.

“Thank you, Sean. Remember it’s at 10:00 in the back parking lot.” She stepped behind her podium. “We’re going to jump four years to 1876 today and talk about the Battle of the Greasy Grass, which some might recognize as the Indian name for the battle better known as Custer’s Last Stand.”

Salas flicked through the required social studies scope and sequence guide for American History. He couldn’t find the Chicago Fire, and the class should have covered Custer’s Last Stand a month earlier, and only in passing. The district’s guidelines emphasized teaching the industrial revolution into the 1870s, and to be “cautious” in discussing “controversial” topics, which included the “resettlement of indigenous natives.”

“Five years after Chicago’s devastating fire, the city was rebuilding and recovering to become one of America’s busiest commerce centers. Meanwhile, 1,200 miles away, in the Montana wilds, General George Armstrong Custer led the 7


 Calvary in an attempt to return Cheyenne and Lakota Indians to their reservations.”

Most students were not taking notes, and although they weren’t talking, they didn’t seem to be paying attention to Hatcher, either. Her soft, almost melodious voice lulled him, and within a few minutes, he lost track. The dress code violation slumped into her desk so her shoulders lowered to the chair’s top. He wrote a comment on the evaluation sheet, “Straightforward lecture. No attempt to engage students’ attention.” He also noted she hadn’t given the students a task, like taking notes, nor had she handed out any aids to guide their thinking, like a graphical organizer or an outline template.

Hatcher droned on and on. Salas looked up at the clock. Only ten minutes into the class. He thought about leaving and then returning to watch what she did in the last five minutes, but the room’s warmth relaxed him. Several students had closed their eyes. Besides, the waiting papers in his office weren’t going anywhere.

His thoughts drifted to what he knew about The Battle of the Little Big Horn: almost nothing. He’d seen a movie with Dustin Hoffman in it years before, Little Big Man, that had the battle in it.

Hatcher’s voice rose and fell in the background, like a breeze. Salas listened, and he found himself imagining the sun setting behind the low Montana hills. He pictured sitting on a horse blanket, back from the cooking fire. It had been too hot during the day for him to want to sit closer. He leaned against his bedding, his mind drifting. They’d been told not to set up tents, which meant they’d do a night march, another long, stumbling trek in the dark, walking from one desolate spot to the next.

Salas twitched, then looked around the room. Had any students noticed he’d almost gone to sleep? None appeared to be looking at him, though. Some were in the exaggerated slump mode like the girl sitting in front of him. A couple rested their heads on their arms. Some propped their elbows on their desks and cupped their chins.

Still, Hatcher continued talking. “Single-shot Springfield carbines jammed when overheated,” she said, and then went on to horses used as breastworks. Twenty minutes passed. Salas closed his eyes. The pencil in his hand grew heavy, reminding him of a gun stock, how it would feel, its solidity. He propped the gun across his knees, sitting on the ground. In the distance, gunfire, the heavy pop of Springfields filled the afternoon air. Custer’s forces, he thought. Custer would drive the enemy back and join them. There were so many hostiles! Even their women were in the battle, waving blankets, scaring the horses away. Did Reno and Benteen know what they were doing?

He took a long, warm drink from his canteen. Other soldiers sat around him, exhausted, frightened. They smelled of dust and horse sweat and days of travel. More gunfire to the north, but the sounds didn’t appear to be getting closer. A horsefly landed on his neck. Bit him. He slapped at it, too tired to care.

Behind the muffled battle sounds and the tired horses’ breathing, he heard a bell. He cocked his head. Who would be ringing a bell on the battlefield, in the sun and dirt and waving grass? He regripped the rifle, and it became a pencil, and the dismissal bell rang, ending class.

“Tomorrow we will cover the aftermath,” said Hatcher. “Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse and the others make for an interesting story.”

Salas looked around, confused. Some students appeared dazed too, but they shook it off before heading into the hallway.




Before going home that afternoon, Salas stopped in the school library to pick up a book on Custer’s Last Stand, but the books were gone. The librarian said, “It was a massacre. Every source checked out before the first bus left the parking lot. Kids were on the computers doing searches like crazy until we closed.”

That night it took a long time to fall asleep. What had happened in Hatcher’s class? The experience unnerved him a bit. Had he suffered a fugue or a blackout? He scratched at the spot on his neck where the horsefly had bit him. The insect must have been in Hatcher’s room, and he incorporated it into the Custer hallucination, because it left a distinct welt on his skin. When he did fall asleep, screams and gunfire and arrows haunted his dreams.




At the day’s beginning, Leanny leaned into his office the same way she’d done the day before. “Did you watch her yesterday? What did you think?”

Salas nodded. When he’d gone over his observation sheet from the day before, he had a hard time remembering what he’d seen in Hatcher’s class. If he’d drifted off while evaluating her, it wouldn’t be fair to the teacher.

“I’m not sure.” He swallowed. “I’m not sure what I learned.”

Leanny nodded knowingly. “But you learned, didn’t you? Did you know that more Hatcher kids go into education than any other teacher in the building? Talk to counseling. They’ll tell you. I’ll bet half the history teachers in the district are Hatcher’s former students. You want to know something else interesting? Look up Theodore Remmick’s grades for this year. He hasn’t had a mark above ‘D’ since sixth grade.” She laughed. “I saw him in the lunch detention room yesterday after you talked to him, reading.”

Salas checked his to-do list. He needed to observe the other two teachers Wahr had added to his evaluations, plus handle today’s parent contacts. He hoped he wouldn’t have a schedule buster, but he ended up spending the morning talking to a junior who had started (and ended) a fight in the locker room. Fighting drew an automatic suspension, but the other student’s parents also wanted to press assault charges, so the campus police officer visited his office several times, as did the district’s lawyer, both boys’ parents, the teacher, and witnesses who couldn’t agree on even the most basic details.

At one point, the parents who wanted to press charges started yelling at Coach Persigo for not supervising the locker room “in a professional manner.” They said they wanted to sue him and the school district.

It took Salas a half hour afterwards with Persigo to convince him the parents weren’t going to sue. “I’ve been in the district too long to put up with this shit,” said Persigo. “We got a real chance to make the playoffs this year. I don’t need the distraction. I can’t teach classes, coach baseball and worry about lawsuits at the same time. No respect. There’s no respect. ”

A false fire alarm cleared the building ten minutes before lunch, which took forty-five minutes for the fire department to respond to, so Salas spent almost an hour wandering around the practice football and baseball fields with the students and their teachers, waiting for the okay to reenter the school.

Leanny caught up to him as he followed the students back into the building. She walked beside him for a minute without talking. Finally, she said, “Do you have an opinion about the new evaluation forms?”

“They’re clear. Fill in the rubric. Add up the score. Teachers know what’s expected. Evaluators know what to look for.”

“Did you notice there’s no measurement like ‘Instills a love of learning in students’? It doesn’t say, ‘Changes students’ attitude about the subject’ or ‘Enriches students’ lives’ or ‘Provides a meaningful adult role model’ or “Creates an environment for student self discovery’?”

Salas put his hands behind his back. Most students were entering the building through the gym doors. They’d piled up to squeeze through the bottle neck, and they weren’t in a hurry to get back to class. He and Leanny stopped behind the milling heads. “You can’t evaluate those areas. They’re subjective.”

“Exactly,” said Leanny. “How much do you remember from high school? I mean, if you had to take a subject test in any class you took, how would you do?”

Leanny smiled at him, which made Salas think she was leading him to a trap. “Not well, probably. I haven’t studied for the tests.”

“Exactly, so if you don’t remember much, and you can’t pass the tests, what was high school’s point? Did you get a measurable experience from it?”

Mostly Salas remembered being on the baseball team during high school. He remembered sitting in Algebra, keeping one eye on the clock and one on the cloud cover out the window. If it rained, they’d go to the gym to throw, which he didn’t like. In the winter, he did weight room work and he ran. By late February, he started marking the calendar, tracking the days left until spring training. He loved it when the coaches trotted with them out to the field, wearing their sweats and ball jackets. He loved wheeling the trashcan full of bats into the dugout. He remembered stepping onto the freshly swept infield and how satisfying a grounder thumping into the glove’s pocket felt.

“I decided to major in P.E. in high school.”

“So other subjects for four years were worth it. You discovered what you loved!”

The crowd shuffled forward. In a few minutes he would be back at his desk, trying to do a full day’s work in the half day he had left.

“I don’t know. Where are you going with this?”

“Just saying the evaluations aren’t the whole picture. Maybe high school is more than observable, measurable achievement.”

Wahr waited for Salas in his office. “We need to move up the schedule on these evaluations. The superintendent wants preliminary staffing done by next week. I’m putting out a note to teachers who are quitting, transferring or retiring. We still have to cut a position, though. How’s Hatcher’s evaluation? Did you watch her?”

Salas didn’t know where to go in his own office. Wahr partially sat on the desk, so Salas didn’t feel like he could sit in the desk chair. He felt like an intruder. “She looks bad on paper. She lectured for the whole period.”

“Just like I said. You need to do at least two more observations. We can’t move on a teacher without three full observations. Collect her lesson plans and check her students’ benchmark test scores to complete the packet.”

Salas thought about the class he’d watched. He could still smell the horses at Greasy Grass. “She gave an… interesting presentation. Being in her room felt… different.”

“I don’t care if she delivered the Sermon on the Mount. You can’t talk to fifteen-year-olds for that long and be effective. She’s an expensive, entrenched fossil who’s teaching like it’s 1950. I can replace her with a first year teacher whose salary would be half as much and who would know the latest trends in education.”

“She might not be our best choice to cut.”

Wahr snorted, pushed himself up from the desk, and said, “I need a name by next week. It ought to be Hatcher, but somehow we’ve got to trim a position. Make a choice.”




Hatcher started the afternoon class with Sitting Bull, but by the end had somehow moved into the Alaskan gold rush. Afterwards, when he looked at his observation sheet, he had written “last American frontier,” “Jack London,” and “Klondike.” He hadn’t written how she began class, whether the students’ learning objectives were on the board, or if she had varied her teaching technique.

As he walked away from her room, though, he rubbed his wrists. They ached and his hands were icy cold as if he had been holding a heavy gold pan in the frigid river’s rolling water, swirling and swirling and swirling the nondescript sand at the pan’s bottom, hoping for telltale color, hoping for a nugget to make the weeks in the wilderness worthwhile. Moving through the hallway, jostled by students going to class, he thought he could still hear the mosquitoes’ incessant buzz, and smell the wind coming down from the frozen mountain tops, still snow-capped in the summer’s middle.

After school, the librarian said, “Sorry. We had a rush on gold mining books. You missed out again.”




Coach Persigo called Salas that evening, just after Salas had settled in front of the television with a sandwich and a beer. The public broadcast station scheduled an interesting sounding documentary on the Alaskan Gold Rush.

“That kid’s parents hired a lawyer. He called me to schedule a deposition. Thirty-five years teaching school, and my techniques are called into question because one immature kid can’t settle an argument without hitting another immature kid. Is that my fault? Kids get into it some time. Is that my fault?”

Salas gripped the phone tightly. He never knew what to say to a teacher in full rant mode.

“I’ve got grandkids, Salas, and I don’t see them enough. My gutters need painting. I don’t have time to waste on a stupid lawsuit.”

Salas gave him the school district’s lawyer’s number. “I’m sure it will come to nothing, Coach. The parents don’t have a case. You know how folks can get. A week from now we’ll be laughing about this.”

Persigo didn’t speak. Salas could hear him breathing. The television showed a snow-covered mountain range, and then zoomed until it focused on a lone man leading a burro up a rude trail. A pick and shovel were strapped to the animal’s back. Salas longed to turn up the sound.

“You’d better be right,” said Persigo. “Life’s too short.”




Salas met with Mrs. Hatcher at lunch to go over his observations, a mandated step in the evaluation process. She dropped her lesson plan book on his conference table and sat in the same chair students who were in trouble used. Even her hands are plump, Salas thought. She personified softness, like a teacher-shaped pillow, but she gazed at him sharply, and when she smiled her face broke into laugh lines.

“Your lecture interested me,” said Salas. “You clearly know your subject area.” (“Subject Area Knowledge” was another area on the evaluation, but he wasn’t sure how to evaluate her there. Did she really know her subject area? He’d fallen into the weird daydream both days, and he didn’t know what she’d said.)

“I love history. I think what I’ve learned most as a teacher in all these years is a passion for my subject.” Her voice was just as gentle in person as in the classroom, and she smelled of lavender.

“Yes, that’s clear.” Salas took a deep breath. He ran his finger down the check-sheet identifying her shortcomings, which were many. But he couldn’t force himself to make a criticism. He had thought this conference would be perfunctory. He’d point out that she ignored the district’s guidelines and policies, allow her to say whatever she wanted in her defense, and then be able to say later they had had a meeting, which the union required. He’d done numerous evaluation meetings in the past with other teachers that were no more substantial.

The truth, he thought, is I don’t have any idea what’s going on in any teacher’s classroom. I’m in them such a small percentage of the time. He remembered his first assistant coaching position. The head coach had sent him to the practice field with the freshmen boys who wanted to play infield. He was supposed to show them technique and evaluate who could start for the first freshmen game coming up in a week. Ambition and idealism filled him. Any boy can learn to play better, he’d thought. They just needed time and the right instruction. He worked with the group for two hours, but just before the practice ended, the head coach stopped by to watch. He said to Salas as he left, “Bad technique. It’ll be a miracle if they win a game this year.”

Salas had been dumbfounded. He thought, But you should see how far they’ve come! You should have seen them two hours ago!

“Can I see your lesson plans?” Salas asked.

Mrs. Hatcher pushed them toward him. She’d written little in individual days. This week, for example, included the Chicago Fire, the Battle of the Little Big Horn, and the Alaska Gold Rush. Hatcher had written “1850-1900” and drawn an arrow through the week.

“Not very detailed,” said Salas.

Mrs. Hatcher laughed. “Detail’s in the head, Mr. Salas. I know what to cover.”

“But I don’t see your learning objectives. You haven’t written the standards you’re teaching. You don’t write them on the board either. I’m supposed to be able to ask any student in your class the learning objective for the day’s lesson, and they should be able to tell me. That’s best practice.”

“Did you ask them this week?”

“Uh, no, but you never stated an objective. They wouldn’t know it.”

Mrs. Hatcher picked up her lesson plan book. “The goal is always the same, Mr. Salas. When they leave my room, they know a little more history than when they came in, and they want to find out more.”

“It’s hardly measurable.” Salas felt miserable. This wasn’t how he’d planned this meeting. He was on the defensive, while Mrs. Hatcher seemed confident and self assured.

“Come in tomorrow. Ask the kids at the beginning and the end. You might find it interesting.”

“What’s the lesson?”

“It’s a good one. The wizard of Menlo Park. Did you know, at the same time Custer made his fatal pursuit at Bighorn, Thomas Edison was working on the idea that would become the phonograph? History is seeing connections. Little Big Horn occurs in 1876, the same year H.G. Wells, the guy who wrote The Time Machine turned ten. H. G. Wells dies in 1946, the year after the atomic bomb. Albert Einstein will be born in 1879. So, three years after Custer’s men have to use their single-shot carbines as clubs because they can’t clear jams from their guns fast enough, the man who gives us the math for the nuclear age comes into the world. Einstein died in 1955. I was a year old in 1955. Einstein, a man who lived when I lived could have talked to people who remembered Little Big Horn. History’s a big story, Mr. Salas, but it’s not incoherent. Everything touches everything. That’s the lesson.”




Salas checked on the lunch detention kids after Mrs. Hatcher left his office. Theodore Remmick had taken a seat in the back, where he read quietly. He had propped the book up on the desk. At first, Salas thought it was a Japanese anime so many kids liked. A bright cartoon image splashed across the book’s cover, but when Salas took another step closer, he could see the title: The Great Chicago Fire of 1871. The illustration showed a fireman handling a fire hose. He looked panicked.

Principal Wahr met Salas in the hallway outside the detention room. His words echoed in the empty hallway. “Persigo’s in your half of the alphabet, right?”

“Yes, I meant to talk to you about him.”

“No need. He turned in his resignation. Some nonsense: lawyers, kids fighting in the locker room, and no respect. He’s going to finish the year, but he’s done. One less evaluation on your plate. Phys Ed averages 54 kids a class. We’ll replace him, but we still need to eliminate a position. Put your action plan on my desk Monday. I don’t want to be messing with staffing while graduation is coming up. Here are the forms you’ll need.” He handed Salas a multi-page packet. “Have you observed the other teachers I suggested?”

“This afternoon, if I’m not interrupted.”

But the drama teacher reported someone had stolen her purse from her desk, so Salas spent the time going over surveillance footage with the campus police officer. After two hours, they noticed the teacher didn’t have her purse when she came into the building from the parking lot.

He only had time to get to Hatcher’s class as the bell rang. Students left her room more slowly than they did most classes, and they had the somewhat dazed expression he now recognized.

“I’m going to the library,” said a boy wearing a rock band sweat shirt. “What else did Edison do?”

“Had you ever heard of Tesla?” said his friend. He rubbed his hand through his hair as if to quell static electricity. “Or Henry Ford?”

They both blinked at the lights in the ceiling like they’d never seen them before.




At home that afternoon, Salas studied the teacher release form packet. Since the state had eliminated teacher tenure several years earlier, all he needed to remove a teacher was documented malfeasance, which he’d compiled during the week. He’d complete his third observation tomorrow, during the class’s weekend meeting.

According to the evaluation sheet, he’d written damning truths. By observable standards, her teaching failed. She didn’t provide learning outcomes. She didn’t follow departmental or district procedures. She ignored “best practice,” and lectured instead. Wahr had been right.

Salas tapped his pen against the papers, then looked out the window, a little sick to his stomach. The afternoon sun slanted across his front yard. He recognized the 5:00 light, the last light Custer and his men saw. Their heavy fighting started maybe an hour earlier, and as the sun beat down, the men were overrun. He remembered Custer, unhorsed, among the remaining soldiers atop a low rise. No cover. No place to run.

Salas couldn’t remember Hatcher talking. He remembered the battle itself. He’d been there. He remembered holding an empty revolver, and he remembered a terrible sadness as men fell, but he wasn’t scared. The world grew peaceful at the end, beneath the shouts and gunfire and screaming horses. He became calm when he realized the long fight was over and he didn’t need to be scared anymore.

And he remembered, too, riding away, back to the village, triumphant. A warrior among thousands, a warrior to make his ancestors and sons proud.




On Saturday, Salas walked across the parking lot toward the students. They’d parked their cars near the school, and were now in the graveled overflow parking, far from the building. He heard someone laugh, and they chattered among themselves.

Mrs. Hatcher and Mrs. Leanny, both wearing overalls, were helping the students arrange display boards on the ground. When he reached the crowd’s edge, he could see the boards laid out in grids, like city streets, complete with small structures glued to their surface.

“Hi, Mr. Salas,” said Theodore Remmick. He wore a ball cap backwards, clearing all the hair from his face. “I’m not going to bring it into the school.” He held up the propane torch from earlier in the week. “I’m the fire marshall.”

“What’s the project?” Salas said.

“We need your equipment at the south end, Sean,” said Mrs. Hatcher. “When we’re ready, start the generator and fan. Theodore will tell you when. Careful you don’t step on West 18


.”

“I saw so little,” said the girl Salas had sat behind his first day in Hatcher’s class. Today she wore a bikini top and cutoff jeans. “So much smoke. It choked me.” She rubbed her throat unconsciously. “I didn’t picture the scope…” She waved at the miniature city.

She stepped to the side, and now Salas could see the entire display.

Mrs. Leanny joined him. “Each board represents a half mile, so it’s 12 boards long and 3 boards wide. There’s 34 kids in the class. Two boards short. Hatcher and I got to do one too.”

Theodore Remmick crouched at the south end, then fired up his torch. A couple kids pointed cell phone cameras. “It’s near 9:00 a.m., Sunday, October 10 in a city of 335,000 people. In two days, 100,00 will be homeless. The fire starts in the O’Leary’s barn.” He let the flame wash over a tiny building, which caught fire immediately. Several students gasped.

“I saw the fire coming,” said a boy holding a camera, but he stopped filming. His hand fell to his side, and his focus drifted. “I was walking home from church with my daughter. At Beach and DeKoven, I smelled burning wood. Smoke rushed up the street. We ran and ran to the Polk Street Bridge to cross the river.”

Tiny flames blackened the board’s end, crisping the miniscule buildings. The students had labeled the streets. Salas recognized them from the lists in Hatcher’s classroom: DeKoven, Meagher, Catherine, Barber. The Chicago River, a blue ribbon, meandered the diorama’s length. He saw the bridge at Polk Street.

“Turn on the fan,” said Theodore Remmick.

Salas stepped back. The students leaned forward intensely. Talk ceased. Someone sobbed. The box fan pushed the fire across the display. In a few minutes, six scale miles caught fire and burned. Stores, offices, warehouses, homes, bridges, schools and hospitals. When the fire reached the far end, Theodore intoned, “On Monday evening, the winds died. Cut the wind, Sean.” The fan rattled to a stop. “And it began to rain.”

Students pulled out squirt guns. They were silent at first, and the water streams hissed when they hit the board, but soon they laughed as they put out the fire, squirting each other just as often as soaking the burned city.

“I want to know more about fire fighting,” said a girl. “What did they learn from this?”

“Did they change the fire codes?” said another.

“How long did it take them to rebuild?”

“Did the mayor get blamed?”

“Did other cities have fires?”

“How much did it cost?”

When Salas left, they were still talking, asking questions, eager to learn. Eager to share what they knew.

Mrs. Hatcher didn’t give a lecture. She hardly spoke, Salas thought in wonder. She never taught at all, but it was the best lesson he’d ever seen.




On Monday, Salas handed his recommendations to Principal Wahr. The bald-headed man studied the one-page report silently. Salas let his gaze wander around the room. Organizational charts covered the walls: arrows pointing to boxes, boxes containing names, names associated to duties. It all seemed impersonal. Standards. Goals. Wahr had framed the school’s mission: “To lead all students to reach their individual potential by rigorously pursuing and evaluating achievement of high academic and ethical standards in a disciplined, nurturing environment.”

Wahr cleared his throat. “This plan cuts your position. You cut your own job.”

Salas took a deep breath. “Coach Persigo turned in his retirement papers. Leanny is willing to do the extra work to save a teaching slot, and I think it’s time I went back to the classroom. P.E. is where I belong.”

Wahr looked baffled. “What about Hatcher? What are your recommendations?”

“You said your son will be going to school here next year, didn’t you?”

“Yes. I need to keep an eye on him. Hates school right now.”

Salas tried to picture Principal Wahr’s boy. Maybe Wahr’s son resembled Salas when he was in school. Maybe he acted indifferent and lazy, just as Salas had.

“Put him in Hatcher’s U.S. History class.”

“Really.” The disbelief reverberated in Wahr’s voice. “She’ll lecture him into a coma.”

“I don’t think so.”

Salas remembered the day’s end at Greasy Grass. A desperate people, for a moment, triumphed, but it was a “last stand” for both sides, a proof you fight even when the campaign looks lost. He closed his eyes to see an image that had returned to him since he’d sat in Hatcher’s room. The sun set on a swell in the land they would later call Custer Hill. A growing dusk, filled with velvety shade covered the grass and brush until the details disappeared. No bodies visible now. No dead horses. No broken lances. No battle remnants. Just the stars and the rolling hills and a treeless horizon. The wind pressed his back. A coyote yipped in the distance, and the village dogs yapped in return.

He had lost friends, warriors all, but the enemy had lost many more. They would sing songs about today. They would tell stories to the childrens’ childrens’ children so no one would forget. The victory at Greasy Grass would join the great tales told back to back, the unbroken voice of people speaking.

It had become history.

What happened in Hatcher’s room? Hypnotism, magic, time travel?

Salas rubbed the goosebumps off his arms and faced Principal Wahr.

“You won’t be sorry your son is in Hatcher’s class,” he said. “She’s exemplary.”




FAR FROM THE EMERALD ISLE


Dragging a pack full of equipment behind her, Anise Delaney crawled her way between the slick inner wall of The Redeemer and the rough textured outer shell. Not only was she tall, but her shoulders were broad. A rugby player’s build wasn’t the best choice for this errand. She envied Sierra’s slight figure who was following. Anise’s back scraped against the metal again, and she opened her mouth in exclamation, but bit the sound short. Something moved in the claustrophobic darkness just beyond her headlamp. She held her breath until it moved closer into the light. It was just a maintenance bot scuttling away on its regular rounds.

She relaxed and said over her shoulder, “By all my calculations, we should be dead.” Her light illuminated the squeezed path before her like a broad but very low mineshaft. The air smelled stale and metallic. She thought about gremlins, dwarves and tommyknockers. And leprechauns. Her grandmother had a few stories about them. This would be the kind of place they would like, walking unseen below the ark-ship crew’s world, causing trouble. She grinned at the idea, but only for an instant; the interior of the gray hull absorbed light, accepted no shadows, and it hurt her hands to crawl on it. Next time I’ll bring gloves and knee pads, she thought.

Sierra, a few feet back, grunted in acknowledgment. “But we’re not dead. That doesn’t mean there was anything extraordinary.”

Anise checked a monitor mounted on her wrist. They were close to where her calculations said there should be an impact crack. “There you go again. I told you from the beginning that they made a mistake when they crewed these ships. We’re homogeneous. All this scientific expertise creates blind spots. We assume everything has a rational explanation and that’s not sensible. Sucks the wonder out of living. Weird things have happened on this ship. Strange sounds behind the walls. Tools moved. Meals missing. Remember when Yatmaso lost his glasses? Couldn’t find them for a week, and there they were, in the middle of his desk. ” She scooted forward ten more feet. Naturally the stressed area would be exactly between two of the access panels. “It’s like that rainbow on the day we took off. I see it as a sign, and when I point it out to you, you give me a lecture on light and refraction. They made sure there was racial and ethnic diversity, but not much diversity of thought. We don’t even have an acupuncturist on board.”

“You’d want to be stuck with needles for a headache? The problem is that you’re homesick, Irish girl.”

“It’s not homesickness. It’s just that everything is so… so… planned. Even our genetics. When we get to Zeta Riticula, the computer will control our breeding, screen our genes, manipulate them to fit the environment, twitch and tweak us to keep us healthy. It has mission control. God knows what all it’s up to. We’re letting the computer make autonomous decisions. I just think that being human means accepting a bit more chance in our lives and staying open to wonder.”

Sierra said, “Chance and wonder gave us the mutagen and drove us off Earth. Besides, I like what the computer is doing. Did you have some of the new tomatoes for lunch? The botanist said that not only are they more resistant to disease, but it takes half the water to grow. That’s what happens when you give a computer some decision making capabilities and a lot of time to work with. Those old people invented gods because they needed to explain how their worlds worked. We engineered ours. How much farther? This is tearing up my hands and knees.”

“I think we’re there.” Anise checked the monitor again. The numbers confirmed they were on the site, but to her eye the surface appeared uniform and undamaged. She dragged her pack to where she could reach it, then pulled out a hull diagnostic device, a sophisticated tester for metal integrity. She was homesick. When they’d started the flight a year earlier (by their time—the Caretaker crew was awake only two weeks of every hundred years, while the ship had been traveling for 2,600 years), homesickness was an easily disregarded triviality. Anise thought now about the hills south of Letterkenny in Donegal where she’d grown up. No more wind off Trawbreaga Bay and Lough Swilly carrying a hint of salt and far away, North Atlantic storms. No more heather-covered hills.

Sierra said, “The maintenance bots have been all over this section, and they didn’t report anything.”

“I know, but I’ve got to see for myself.” Anise connected the two thumb-sized transmitters a yard apart on the hull, then pressed the diagnostic device’s trigger, sending a low-level radiation pulse through the hull, which tested whole for three feet before reaching a complicated series of cracks that lead all the way to the outer surface and the vacuum of space. Beyond that the device didn’t measure, but Anise could imagine the light years of emptiness. Light years from Earth and Ireland. Light years from Zeta Riticula. She tried to remember what the morning mist felt like on her last hike to the ancient circular fortress, Grianan of Aileach, where she stood atop the thousands of years old wall waiting for the weather to break. On a clear day she could see the Swilly estuary, the Inishowen peninsula and much of Derry, but the fog never broke. The cool, damp stones were slick under her fingers. She’d heard a noise behind her, a quick, light laugh. No one stood in the fortress’s circular sward. The tops of the wall in both directions were empty. It didn’t take much to believe that there was more to the world than appeared when she was by herself in a land filled with so many stories.

“Nothing close here.” She moved six feet and replanted the sensors.

“Which is just what the computer reported. Why can’t you admit that the hull performed the way it was designed? In the event of a collision, force is supposed to be transmitted laterally. That way a speck can’t poke all the way through.”

“When we’re going at a quarter of the speed of light, a ‘speck’ packs one hell of a lot of kinetic energy, and this was much more than a dust mote. The numbers say it was about the size of a marble. The ship should have shattered like a porcelain egg.” She read the results again. The cracks radiated to within a foot of the inner surface.

“I don’t get why you’re looking for a break in the hull when there clearly isn’t one. We’d be freeze-dried and vacuum-packed if there was. Do you hear a breeze? I don’t hear a breeze. The hull held. The outside squads will resurface the ship, and we’ll be back in the sleep pods before you know it.”

Anise scooted farther forward. “Well, if the numbers tell me that we should be busted, and we’re not, I’d like to know why.”

“For once the ship exceeded the design specs.”

Anise saw the crack before her monitor reported it to her. The inside surface of the hull had a grain to it, representing the millions of interwoven carbon-metal threads that gave the ship its unprecedented durability, but it needed that strength if it was going to survive the 4,000 year-long trip to Zeta Riticula intact, and deliver its crew of mostly slumbering Caretakers and frozen embryos and colonization gear to the distant planet. Her head lamp showed the break, a long, crooked line across the rough texture. The monitor confirmed it: the series of fissures emanating from the collision led all the way to here, hundreds of yards from the impact spot on the hull’s exterior.

At first it was just a hairline; then, it widened to as much as a fingernail in thickness, four feet long. Anise scrinched forward, directing her light onto the hull.

Sierra inhaled sharply. “God! You were right, but it can’t be continuous. Not to the surface.”

Anise didn’t answer. The monitor told her the story. The line was a part of a ten foot thick system of fractures. She pressed her finger against the crack, then looked at the raised mark it left on her skin. “We should be dead.”

Sierra offered, “The bots…”

“Were knocked out. Two hours without power while the ship rerouted energy and woke us up. Besides, they weld hull breaks. No weld here.” She unsnapped a knife from her tool belt, then poked the end into the crack. It was hard to see, since the gap was so narrow, but it didn’t appear to be more than a half inch deep. The knife stopped. She jabbed it in again. There was a little give, not like metal against metal. More like digging into wood. Carefully, she rocked the knife point back and forth. When she brought it out, a white residue coated the end.

“What is it?” asked Sierra.

“We need to get back to the lab.” Anise scraped the residue into an envelope and sealed it.




At the end of her work shift, Crew Chief Yatmaso paused at Anise’s station. His hair was uncombed, and tiredness bruised the skin beneath his eyes. “Sierra says you found a crack in the hull, a real crack?”

“It’s sealed, but that’s not what’s—”

“Thank goodness for that. The repair squads are working in gangs to refurbish the exterior. With some effort, we should be sleeping again in a few days, but it’s thrown off everyone’s schedule. There’s a committee deciding if the next crew should be awakened early, or if we should keep them on cycle. It’s an extra seventeen years before the next maintenance that way, but then we’d be back to normal. Plus, we’ve got to worry if there’s another stone like the last one in front of us. We shouldn’t have hit anything.”

Anise pushed a notebook at him. “Can you look at my numbers?”

He took the notebook in one hand and rubbed his eyebrows with the other. “Couldn’t you show me these on your computer? Your handwriting is terrible.”

She crossed her arms. “I get different numbers on the computer.”

The crew chief handed her the notebook. “Then you made a mistake.”

“The crack in the interior wasn’t welded.”

“It wasn’t leaking either. It just means the maintenance-bots missed it. The system was under a lot of stress those first hours after the collision.”

Before she could even give him a disgusted look, he left. She leaned back in her chair, the notebook in her lap. Above her monitor was a digital display from home: a long, green hill, sun-streaked and cloud-shadowed. In the foreground stood a whitewashed cottage with a thatched roof. During the summer she used to explore the hills, heather and clover and dew-damp moss in the air, sometimes taking an entire afternoon to climb one, her thighs burning. Folks called Ireland the Emerald Isle, and they were right. The more she thought about it, the greener it became. The month before the flight she’d spent seaside at Bundoran in south Donegal, where cliffs bracketed the beach on either side. Waves had carved the stone into fantastic lavender-blue formations, but behind them the hills rose, green on green.

It takes a long time to say goodbye to a country, and she didn’t realize she was, really realize she was until it was too late.

She flicked her monitor to the analysis of the white residue she’d found in the crack. She’d asked the computer to identify it and run a match. It was plastic, the same kind that formed almost everything on the ship that wasn’t metal. How did plastic end up blocking a crack that could have been disastrous to their mission? What saved the ship during the two hours when the maintenance bots were down?

After a few key clicks, the time line for the collision came up. At zero hundred hours, a marble-sized rock hit The Redeemer. Power supplies to the bots and most of the ship’s key systems, including the computer, were interrupted. Automatic routines independent of the computer kicked in, warming a Caretaker crew and searching for alternate paths around the system breaks. An hour and fifty minutes later, the computer regained ship control. The bots started moving, and ten minutes after that, the crew began to awaken to klaxons and emergency lights.

Anise tapped her finger against the monitor. The bots scurried everywhere in the record. They had to have found the crack she’d found. They couldn’t miss it. But by then it was already sealed.




Anise’s mattress felt stiff beneath her. Not that that was surprising. It was 2,600 years old, as were the sheets and blankets and the clothes she wore. Everything on the ship had a brittle look to it. The engineers and manufacturers put The Redeemer together out of theory and hope. Could humans survive repeated cold sleep to make the 4,000 year long trip? Could the ship keep itself repaired? Could the crew remake and recalibrate the hundreds of times it would take to arrive at the distant star? Yes, in theory.

As she tried to sleep, she thought about the computer, a redundantly designed, decentralized intelligence interlaced throughout the ship, capable of independent action, controlling all the systems, directing the toaster-sized, multi-tooled bots that scurried through the maintenance tunnels like industrious mice. What did the computer do while they were asleep? Why didn’t her collision calculations done by hand match the numbers the computer spit out? And, most nagging, how did the plastic that undoubtably saved their lives end up in the crack the bots hadn’t found?

Finally, after what seemed like hours of trying to find a comfortable position, she drifted on the self-aware edge of consciousness, half hearing the ship, half hearing the mountain rush of her own blood- stream. Lazily she thought of an old lover, long dead now on Earth. She had picked him because he looked like William Butler Yeats, a long face behind black, wire-rimmed glasses. Anise asked him to read her poetry, and as she settled deeper into sleep, she heard his voice until he became a part of a dream, and in the dream he became William Butler Yeats sitting on a rock along the trail to the flat-topped mountain, Benbulbin. Not the old Yeats who wrote “The Second Coming,” with its prophetic, “What rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?” —the rough beast indeed of the mutagen that had driven them to build the ark-ships and sent them skyward, trusting that not everything human need end—but a young man in his mid-twenties, the one who collected Irish folktales and wrote, “I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree, and a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made: nine bean rows will I have here, a hive for the honey bee, and live alone in the bee-loud glade.”

Yeats held a walking stick in one hand, and a book lay open on his lap. “What are you looking for, lass, so early on a morning as fine as this?”

But before she could answer his question, a wind came up, and the figure of Yeats dissolved into a wisp and the rock was empty. Behind her, something laughed. She turned, and the long trail down the mountain was empty, though there were many limestone boulders a being could hide behind. She thought, there must be leprechauns or Sidhe, the fairy folk.

Yeats’s voice came out of the wisp. “One wonders if the creatures who live followed us from the ruins of our old towns, or did they come from the banks of the river by the trees where the first light had shone for a moment?”

Even in the dream, she was puzzled, and when she sat on the rock where Yeats had been, she found it wasn’t rock at all, but white plastic. She scraped at it and white remnants stuck under her fingernails. The wind blew again, moaning through the rocks. She could see it, eddying through the fog below her where the trail disappeared, twisting the gray cloud into fantastic shapes. For a second she saw faces. Scowling faces, and she couldn’t breathe.

They were taking the air, the faces in the fog, stealing the air from around her. The hull is breached, Anise thought. She tried to scream, but when her mouth opened all the breath rushed out. No air! She flopped off the rock, hand at her throat, while the sky darkened so quickly that within a few eye blinks stars shone through.

The hull is breached!

* * *


Deep in the warehouse module, Anise found what she’d been searching for, the raw polychloride supplies that served as a base for any of dozens of kinds of plastics the ship might need. Six huge vats standing on stubby legs held the chemicals. Sierra wandered toward the back of the room. “I don’t see what the point in coming down here. It’s been hundreds of years since this area’s been used.”

The low ceilinged room absorbed the sounds of their footsteps. Recessed wall lights illuminated the area poorly. Anise imagined steely-eyed little people watching them from the deep shadows. She shook her head, then popped the latch on the first vat and pushed the lid. It resisted for an instant, then the hinges gave way reluctantly. According to the records, this vat hadn’t been opened in eight-hundred years. Grainy, white flakes filled it to the top. She dipped her hand in thoughtfully. Plastic, exactly like what she’d found choking the crack in the hull fell from her grip like sand. Under the atmospheric pressure from within the ship, the plastic had solidified into an airtight seal. If the crack had been any more than a complex set of fissures, the plastic would have flown into space with their air, but the break had been so narrow and filled with twists and turns that the plastic piled up, expanded and corked the leak.

Anise picked up another handful, let the grains trickle between her fingers and tried to picture what had happened in the minutes after the collision. The records showed the computer went off line. The bots, without direction, froze. Emergency lights with their own power supplies turned on. At the break, air would have been screaming: the deadly whistle that spelled death, only no one was awake to hear it. How did the plastic get into the crack?

She massaged her forehead. In the old stories, leprechauns would sometimes do a worthy family a favor. Every culture, it seemed, had stories of little people by various names: elves, fairies, peri, pooka, nymphs, dwarves, gnomes, brownies, goblins, nixes, kobold, trolls and gremlins.

In her dream, Yeats had asked where the creatures came from. Had they followed humanity from town to town, or did they generate spontaneously from the land? Old Earth was dead now or dying. Was it possible that something other than the thoroughly inventoried supplies, the carefully thought out stockpiles of embryos and tools and equipment was aboard The Redeemer?

How would it live?

Anise said, “You checked on air consumption like I asked?”

Sierra peeked over the top of one of the vats. “Yep. The numbers line up perfectly. Nothing is breathing on this ship that we don’t know about. Not only that, but nothing is eating, drinking or processing waste either. I suppose you’ll say that confirms a supernatural explanation.”

“I like the idea of the supernatural. That doesn’t mean I believe that’s what happened. How’d the plastic seal the breach?”

“Maybe there was plastic residue on the hull?”

Sierra’s tone showed that even she thought the explanation was weak. Anise shut the lid and relatched it.

“Ah, ha!” said Sierra. “Take a look at this.”

Anise hurried past the vats, squeezing between the last one and the storage lockers that made up the wall. Sierra was on her knees. “See,” she said, “there doesn’t have to be a supernatural component. Rationality rules.”

On the floor was a white pile of plastic, spilled from a small rupture at the back of the tank. Sierra said, “So, some of the plastic wasn’t in the vats.”

Anise dropped to her knees, pushed her finger into the gap, provoking a mini plastic avalanche. “Huh! It’s a long way from this room to the crack in the hull. How did it get from here to there?”

“One problem down, one to solve,” said Sierra triumphantly. “Maybe this time luck was on our side.”

“Luck of the Irish?” asked Anise.

Above Anise’s head, from an air vent, came a quick scratching, like twigs on metal. She looked up. “Did you hear that?”

Sierra looked up too. “No. What was it?”

Anise held her breath, waiting for the sound to repeat. “I don’t think it was a bot.” She contemplated the pile of plastic on the floor. “Normal maintenance should have caught this long ago.”

Sierra leaned her back against a locker. “Are you sure you heard something?” A distinct thump of thin metal rebounding echoed through the room, as if something weighty had moved in the air duct. Sierra jumped, then rubbed her arms, still looking up. “The bots are practically perfect. They never miss stuff.” She stood, holding her elbows tight, her arms close to her side as if she were cold.

“No, they shouldn’t. Let’s go back to my station. I want to check something.”

Before she closed the door to the module, Anise looked back into the room. It didn’t take much to picture faces in the dark, to see tiny fingers wrapped around the air vent where something hidden studied her.




Anise said, “We have to eliminate possibilities. First, is it possible that a Caretaker was awake during the collision?”

Sierra consulted her monitor. “According to the computer records, no.”

“Could the computer be wrong?”

“Not likely. Not only does the computer keep track where everyone is, but each sleep tank has its own start-up and shut-down history. I checked all fifty of our shift’s tanks, and also the one-hundred and fifty tanks from the other three shifts. No Caretaker was awake.”

“Is it possible there’s another person on board who never uses the sleep tanks?”

Sierra laughed. “He’d be over 2,600 years old.” She sobered. “I haven’t been able to think of a single explanation. Not only that, but I ran an analysis of duty logs since the trip started, and from nine-hundred years or so ago, the incidence of unexplainable phenomena began going up. Not just misplaced tools either. Clothing has been moved. Doors open that should be closed. Repairs made that weren’t ordered. All kinds of stuff. If you look into the public journals, there’s dozens of other odd reports too. Many crew members have recorded feelings like they’re being watched, or that something moved in the corner of their eye. It gives me the creeps. The computer monitors everything that happens on board, and it reports nothing. Maybe we do have gremlins.”

“Leprechauns,” Anise said absently. “We’re missing a bet, here. There’s a factor we’re overlooking. I’m going to put some equipment together. Come back tomorrow. I’ll need your help again.”

Sierra looked pained. “Yatmaso says we go back into the sleep pods in two days. I don’t like the idea of leaving the ship to ghosts and other slithery creatures while I’m unconscious. Do you think they come look at us?” She shivered.

“Now look at who’s not being rational.”

“It’s your fault. I’ve examined the computer records, the bot work schedules, and every anomalous occurrence on the ship in the last nine hundred years. It doesn’t make sense. If there was something else on board, there would be computer records, but there’s nothing there. Something put the plastic into the breach, and the best explanation is your leprechauns. We’re on a possessed or infested ship.” Sierra tightened her hands until her knuckles whitened bright as paper. “I’m not sleeping tonight. I’m not sleeping ever again.”

“Come back tomorrow.” Anise put her hand on Sierra’s shoulder, whose muscles were rock tight and trembling.

After Sierra left, Anise gathered her supplies. First, to the kitchen for bread and cheese, and then to the electronics warehouse. Finally she visited cryogenic storage, where drawer after drawer of frozen, fertilized ovum waited for their test tube births. She searched for over an hour, opening one drawer after another until she found what she’d been looking for.

As she set up the equipment in the access crawlway, near where she’d discovered the sealed crack, she remembered that Yeats wrote once, “I have been told that the people of Faery cannot even play at hurley unless they have on either side some mortal… . Without mortal help they are shadowy and cannot even strike the balls.”




When Sierra entered the room, it was clear she hadn’t been sleeping. Her face was haggard and her hair uncombed. “I ran a zillion scenarios on the computer last night, and none of them add up to an explanation. It’s not rational.”

Anise smiled. For the first time in days she felt both excited and relaxed. “I have some recorded video I want you to watch. Take a seat.”

Sierra collapsed on a chair. “If it’s more that a couple minutes, I’ll drift right off.”

“Oh, I think you’ll stay awake for this.” Sierra pressed a button that flashed an image onto her desk monitor.

Sierra leaned forward. “What’s that? It looks like bread and something else.”

“Cheese.” Anise forwarded the image, keeping an eye on the time record. “Watch close.”

Sierra shook her head, puzzled. “Where is this? Why’s it so poorly lit?”

“The maintenance crawlway.”

“There isn’t a camera there. Is that from a bot?”

“No. It’s one I rigged up to transmit its images straight to here. Hush, now.”

The two women studied the screen.

“There!” said Anise. A long, fuzzy, shadowed shape reached from one side of the image, grabbed a piece of bread, then disappeared.

“What the hell was that?” Sierra gripped the desk’s edge, her face only inches from the monitor. Anise hadn’t seen her get out of her chair.

“Wait, there’s more.”

This time the movement was slower. Whatever it was was too close to the camera to be clearly focused. It blocked the image, turning the screen black. Then, it turned, sitting beside the cheese, still dark and nebulous until it stood, the rest of the bread and cheese in its arms. It looked toward the camera as if sensing the spying presence. For an instant the light was right, and the creature’s eyes were clear, its large, round head distinct. It vanished again.

Sierra gasped. “Is that a… leprechaun?”

Anise laughed. “No, it’s a mouse. Or its great, great, great grandfather was a mouse a thousand years ago or so, a couple thousand generations ago.”

“A mouse! What do you mean? It’s a foot-and-a-half tall if it’s an inch.” Sierra touched the monitor where Anise had backed up the image to the face in the dark, its arms full of cheese and bread.

“I went over all the data you did last night. The absence of evidence. No video of anything untoward. No record of increased air, food or water consumption. Nothing that indicated the presence of other beings onboard the ship, and yet it was clear that we weren’t alone. You know what was in common in all my negative searches?”

Sierra looked baffled. “No.”

“The computer. All my questions went through the computer. All the searches went through the computer. What tipped me off was the numbers on the collision. When I did them by hand, there was enough force from the collision to produce the crack we found, but the computer kept giving me smaller numbers. The computer didn’t want us to find the crack.”

“You think the computer made the leprechauns?”

“I know so. From mice embryo. I found the empty capsules in the cryogenics room. When I confronted the computer with the evidence, all sorts of blocked files tumbled free. There’s a complete record of the breeding program. There’s a leprechan nursery deep in the maintenance shafts where the bots can get to, but we wouldn’t go. All the consumable records had been faked to hide their existence.”

Sierra sat again. Her gaze wandered around the room. Anise guessed she was searching for something to say.

“Why would the computer do it?” Sierra paused. “Oh, give me a second. It must have calculated the possibility of just the situation we faced, where all the power would be down. The computer’s designed to operate without our input. It decided that a sentient work force that was always awake was necessary.” She laughed. “And the computer was right. We’re alive today because the leprechauns poured plastic into the breach. God, that’s brilliant. How smart do you think they are? How does the computer communicate with them? The biology people are going to have a field day with this. Have you told Yatmaso? I can’t wait to see his face.”

Sierra rushed from the room before Anise could speak. She looked at the Irish landscape mounted on her wall and remembered how old and spirit-haunted the stones of Grianan of Aileach felt beneath her hand on that last trip. She said to the empty room, “What’s more interesting is not what the computer did, but why it hid it. Maybe it grew bored, like any other god, and thought it would make some wee people to entertain it.”

She shut her eyes and sighed. There was a rational explanation, full of wonder to be sure, but rational just the same. It was a long way from Ireland, a long way from the Emerald Isle.

He sadness lasted for a moment until, suddenly, she knew she wasn’t alone in the room. Her eyes flew open and caught a shadow moving on the wall. From behind her, she heard a familiar laugh, high and light and tinkling in the air, but when she turned, there was nothing.




HOWL ABOVE THE DIN


Sharon braced the door against the wind with her foot. “So what’s up with the wolves anyway? It’s spooky, them disappearing on the night Fitz took his dive.”

Dr. Roman closed his notebook and placed it exactly in the center of the desk. Sharon leaned against the door jamb, her flannel shirt unbuttoned one button too many as always. She added sarcastically, “You know he spent his last night outside the enclosure with the wolves, again.”

“He could do that, Sharon. Dr. Fitzgerald was an expert in wolf intelligences. You, however, are only a grad student on loan from Environmental Science.”

She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. Roman automatically categorized the gesture: covering the mouth suggested the person was lying or felt she was being lied to. “He was naked,” she said, “again. He thought he was that weird Farley Mowat guy from the old movie about wolves. Don’t you think that was a little twisted? Not to speak ill of the dead, but he wasn’t right.”

Roman placed his fingertips on the edges of the notebook and moved it a micrometer, aware that not making eye contact also suggested lying or evasiveness. He pressed the notebook hard enough that it bowed slightly in the middle. “Your job is in front of the computer researching the records or taking notes, not critiquing Fitzgerald’s methods. He was patterning adaptive behavior for them.”

She “hmphed” loudly. “His pattern. Not a wolf pattern, or a coyote one either. Either he wanted to be a wolf, or he wanted the wolves to be him. Check the transmission records. He transmitted himself. It wasn’t ethical. And you can pretend to defend him if you want, but I didn’t see you spending any extra time with him the last couple of months.”

Roman closed his eyes and counted slowly backward from five. The notebook relaxed: he could feel the edges uncrinkling beneath his fingers. “Six months is a long stay on an island. Maybe we all are a little twisted.”

“And that’s another thing: Fitz’s ‘geo-psionic’ isolation. Nobody bought that theory in academia. They laughed at him at the university. In the meantime, I haven’t had a date since November. Wolves only go into heat once a year, but they’re getting laid more often than I am. This might as well be a monastery.”

Wind pushed Sharon’s light hair around her face and into her eyes. A poster of canis lupus on the wall fluttered. Behind her, the sun sharply outlined the wind-warped yews bending away from the Pacific, their gnarled limbs stretching perpetually inland.

“Well, your time is almost up now,” said Roman. “The ferry will be here this evening.”

“You know what else? I haven’t heard the wolves since he died either. A terrible ruckus that night, then nothing. Not a howl, a bark or a whine. Nothing. It’s creeping me out. I’ll bet Fitz was right: they got tired of the limited space and tried to swim to the mainland.” She tucked her hands into her back pockets and headed toward the Quonset hut that held her quarters and the communication/computer facilities.

Roman stepped to the door; the island spread below him. The wind beat hardest here, and almost never stopped, but he had liked the view. In front of him, the west-facing cliffs and their sentinel yews sheltered the island from the worst of the wind. On the narrow gravel beach a hundred feet below, waves ground and hissed. Roman avoided looking at the point of rock at the cliff’s edge where they’d found Fitzgerald’s abandoned equipment and the note only Roman had read. He pressed his hand to his back pocket where he felt the slight bulge of Fitzgerald’s last words. Now, every plant reminded him of Fitzgerald, every rock, the sweep of sand, the sound of wind over them all, and he wanted to apologize to them. It’s my fault, he thought, and he blinked his eyes against the weight of memory.

“It can’t be done,” he said to himself. “It’s thirty miles to the coast, and wolves don’t behave like that.”

Roman watched as Sharon trudged down the trail to her hut, fifty yards away, her head tucked to her shoulder to resist the wind. Beyond the hut, the research center rose out of a stand of dwarf Oregon Pine. It housed the lab and the tunnel exits from the research compound into the wolf reserve. Like the other two buildings on the island, its sides were deeply rust-streaked. On storm days, salt spray lashed over the cliffs and dampened everything, corroding the two ATV’s so badly that now the researchers walked everywhere. Fortunately, Roman thought, the northeast corner of the island, at the extreme end of the reserve, was only a half-dozen miles away.

Roman scanned the island. Salt-grass meadows and stands of cedar, yew and pine threaded with trails dotted the sloping bowl of land, which held the rare wolf pack. As far as he knew, it was the largest collection of wolves on the planet; all the rest were relegated to zoos. Crowding had eliminated the last wilderness areas years ago. There were no free wolves.

On an island this size, if he had to, he could hike anywhere in an hour or two. And he preferred it that way. A couple of times a week he would enter the reserve through one of the tunnels and wander, glorying in the space, the solitude. No buildings. No roads. No clatter of machinery. He’d sit in one of the meadows, a twisted pine to his back and watch the wind rush over the salt grass unencumbered.

None of the wolves were visible, and they hadn’t been for over a week. Still, there were only sixteen of them and he rarely saw them from here. They lay in shelters during the day, avoiding the wind, and were more active at night. He dismissed the idea that they had jumped into the ocean. Even if they could smell the mainland, they’d drown long before they got there. No, they were still on the island.

In the distance, skimming the white-topped waves, a hovercraft oil tanker thundered southward toward San Francisco or Los Angeles. Sometimes at night the lights of returning fishing boats blinked in the mouth of Desperation Bay where the Columbia emptied into the Pacific. The packed lights of the heavily populated coast were too far away to see but brightened the horizon when the fog wasn’t heavy.

Roman put on a jacket and trotted to the research center. The April wind was bitter and damp, smelling of the deep ocean and winter storms. It cut through his clothes. He didn’t understand how Sharon could walk around wearing a flannel shirt but no coat, and Fitzgerald’s nudist tendencies had been baffling.

Roman struggled to open the research center’s door, and he pictured the last time he’d seen Fitzgerald in this building. Fitzgerald had been scribbling into his notepad, a heavy blanket wrapped around his thin shoulders. He hadn’t turned around when the wind snapped the door out of Roman’s hand, slapping it against the metal-sided building. He sat with his back rigid, one hand a fist on his thigh, the other tight around his pen. Every line of his posture said “anger” to Roman, and the anger was at him.

“Coyotes,” said Fitzgerald, still writing, his thick, dark hair hiding his eyes, “will ambush prey. That’s one way they survive. I have a story here from Wyoming about a coyote that lured a Labrador Retriever out of its yard by appearing to play with it. The Lab followed the coyote to a gully that ran through the town where a pack of them tore it up.” Fitzgerald had a melodic voice, very smooth. Roman leaned toward him to listen, then caught himself and drew back.

Roman sighed. “Coyotes trick, but don’t hunt as a pack. That’s wolf behavior.”

Fitzgerald looked up. His eyes matched the darkness of his hair, but he was squinting, and his breathing was shallow. A long smudge of dirt marked one cheek. “In the old stories, coyotes are tricksters, while the wolf in myth is the dullard. The wolf gets tricked. Coyotes adapt. Something different in their brains allowed them to change. That’s why they still thrive while the wolf has died out. Wolves pursue prey and pull it down. They need to comprehend the coyote way. The coyote even moved into suburban environments. I have stories here of coyotes in playgrounds, parks and alleys. The key is to look at the coyote. We learn from the coyote to make a trickster wolf.”

Fitzgerald put his bare feet up on the chair by his desk. He turned on his hip to face Roman. His right knee came up; his left dropped. Right hand on the desk. Left one on his thigh; the notebook balanced in his lap. The body language was suddenly open, inviting, nonthreatening. A sarcastic invitation. Insincere body language. Roman grimaced and resisted the urge to cross his arms on his chest.

“The wolf is not a wolf if you turn it into a coyote. I still say the answer is in controlled breeding programs in the zoos. That’s the only way wilderness animals can survive human encroachment.”

Fitzgerald had stared at him a long time after that, his high cheek bones red from the wind, but the rest of his face was pale almost to transparency. Roman knew that Fitzgerald slept during the day, going out at night when the wolves were most active.

Finally Fitzgerald said, “They’re not wolves if you control them either.”

Roman pulled the door shut against the wind, shaking the memory of Fitzgerald out of his head; his ears popped as the door closed. He sat in Fitzgerald’s chair and opened the top notebook in a pile of notebooks that reached from the floor to the top of the desk. Inside, filling the page from one side to the other without a margin, was Fitzgerald’s crabbed, dense handwriting. Most of it philosophical. Fitzgerald mixed his research and theories with musings about the wolves’ role in the environment. Several pages in, Roman found a section on wolf mythology. Each story ended with an aphorism. One story told of a wolf who, while passing by a cottage in the forest, overheard an angry mother scolding her baby, “If you cry once more, I’ll throw you to the wolf.” The wolf, figuring such a small child would surely cry again, waited under the window, tongue out and tail wagging. Though the child cried many times over the days while the wolf grew hungrier and hungrier, the mother never tossed the child to the wolf. The aphorism after this story was, “Enemies’ promises were made to be broken.” Fitzgerald had underlined this several times.

Roman read the pages carefully. The clues to Fitzgerald’s progress, and maybe an explanation of the wolves’ current whereabouts might be buried in the notebooks, but this book was filled with minutia, and of little help. Most of the middle looked like a rough draft of an explanation of his work. Several paragraphs attempted to illustrate how memories and behaviors form, and the multiple techniques he was using to induce behavioral changes in wolves. Roman frowned, it looked as if Fitzgerald used his own brain configuration as a pattern. Sharon was right. For months he’d been using the radio-telepathy equipment to broadcast his own problem solving abilities into the wolves. He was supposed to be using the coyote recordings.

The last few pages contained an elegiac description of the wolf in the wild. Fitzgerald had been fascinated by wolf stamina. He’d written, “No other animal can sustain as steady an effort as a wolf. They have been known to trot without rest for days. If they have a goal, no distance will defeat them.”

After a half hour, Roman put the notebook down and opened the next. He stared at the first page, perplexed. Then the door rattled, and Sharon entered, holding the door firmly against the wind. Roman’s ears popped again.

Sharon threw her hip into the door to latch it. “There’s nothing in the computers, just his stuff on biochemical strategies to convert transient signals into lasting changes in the neurons. And there’s the DNA work. Most of his graphs are a couple of months old. Just when he looks as if he was getting somewhere with it, he quit entering data. Oh, yeah. He’s got about a third of the computer tied up in ongoing analysis of the hippocampus CAT scans we took on the alpha couple five weeks ago. I’m locked out. Do you know his password?” She pushed hair out of her eyes. It was a coquettish gesture.

Annoyed, Roman put his finger into the notebook to mark the page. She always seemed to be flirting, and he bit back the impulse to say something. “I don’t think what we want is in the computers. He didn’t like them. You could be more useful if you hiked north and found out where the wolves have gone to ground. I’ve only got a week before the funding’s done, and they’ll split the pack between Ottawa and Anchorage in the spring. If I’m going to salvage any of his work, I need some answers.”

“Thank you very little. I’ll stay behind the fences. As I came up, I saw the deer you released last week. The wolves aren’t eating. I’ll try the binoculars again.”

“Wear a coat.”

“Did you check the transmission records?”

Roman shook his head, leaned across the desk and punched up the records on a display. They listed time of initiation, length of transmission, band widths and content. The display confirmed Fitzgerald’s notebooks. For the last weeks he had abandoned the coyote recordings, and instead had hooked himself into the powerful radio-telepathy array to broadcast himself at the pack. Hour after hour of it. Roman tasted bile on his tongue. What behaviors had he sent? What inadvertent parts of his personality went with it? What emotions? He turned the display off, the switch a noisy click in the small room.

Sharon paused at the door. The wind murmured around the opening, pushing her hair back into her face. Roman caught a whiff of salt water. The weather prediction was for a storm, and evidently it was beating the waves into spray on the rocky western side of the island. “You were such friends. What happened at the end? He really hated you. I could see it.”

Roman shrugged.

Sharon looked at him compassionately. “Come off the island. The wolves don’t need you here. They’ll be rounded up in a month whether you’re supervising or not. It wasn’t your fault. You couldn’t have known.”

Roman looked away. I’m being evasive, he thought. I’m lying with my eyes. “I have work to do yet.”

After she shoved the door tight, Roman opened the notebook. Instead of more of Fitzgerald’s brain-numbing handwriting, the first page had just two words written on the upper left corner, like the salutation of a letter, “Dear Roman.” No comma, no other text, just “Dear Roman” and the rest blank. Page after page the same, until the last page, where under the two words was another of the myths, but this one wasn’t about wolves. It told about a scorpion that wanted to cross a river and asked a frog to give him a ride. The frog said, “I can’t let you on my back. If I do, you will sting me, and I will die.” The scorpion said, “If I sting you, then you will drown and so will I.” The frog thought about that for a minute, then agreed to give the scorpion a lift. Halfway across the river, the scorpion stung the frog, and as the paralysis started to reach the frog’s limbs, he said, “Why did you do that? You’ve killed us both.” The scorpion shrugged and said, “It’s my nature.”

The story was signed, “Yours in nature, Fitzgerald.”

Sadly Roman recalled coming to the island six months ago. He and Fitzgerald had spent hours sitting in this room discussing their work, and Fitzgerald often talked of “nature.” One evening he said, “It is the wolf’s nature to mark its territory. It is man’s nature to push back the wilderness, to wipe out the marks.”

Roman had paused in his notetaking, his pen poised above the page and said, “But man can control his ‘nature.’ He’s not hardwired to behaviors. There’s no instinctive component in man.”

Fitzgerald tilted his head after that statement, a very wolf-like posture that meant the same thing in the animal: puzzlement. The sides of the Quonset hut shook with the wind that now Roman was used to, but then he had glanced around as if he expected the metal walls to crumple at any moment. Fitzgerald wrapped both hands around his coffee cup, brought it to his lips but didn’t drink. “That’s an odd thing for a behavioralist to say. What do you think of Sharon?”

“What do you mean?” They hadn’t been on the island long, and Roman had found much about Fitzgerald to admire: his ease with himself, the liquid transitions from thought to thought, and his genius for connecting them. “Umm… Sharon. Well, she’s competent enough. She might get a little lonely out here. It’s a long haul for a grad student in the field.”

“You don’t think she’s good looking?” asked Fitzgerald. He put his cup down, ran his fingers through his hair, and then cleared his throat.

Roman automatically cataloged the gestures—all indicated nervousness. “I hadn’t noticed. I suppose she is.”

Fitzgerald grinned. “She showers with her drapes open. Her window faces your hut. Notice that?”

“No, I haven’t. It wouldn’t be appropriate. She’s a grad student for crying out loud.” Roman clicked his pen several times in a row, noticed the action and quelled it. Playing with objects was also a sign of nervousness.

Fitzgerald leaned back in his chair and steepled his hands on his chest. “You make it sound like she’s a child. You’re not ten years older than she is. Maybe it’s not your nature to notice.”

Roman laughed. “Maybe not. Maybe not. But it keeps me professional too.”

Fitzgerald shook his head, then moved into a lengthy explanation of the combined techniques he was using to change the wolves’ behavior. “If we nudge their learning curve just a bit, we can establish stable populations outside of the zoos.”

“You’re quixotic. They range too widely. Too much of their diet is big game, and they won’t stick to park lands and green belts. Even if people will leave them alone—there’s no guarantee of that—they won’t flourish on limited range.”

“But they have to. That’s all there is to it. They have to!” Fitzgerald’s face darkened in abrupt vehemence, and he looked down to his hands resting in his lap. “Wolves are part of what’s best about being human.”

Abashed, Roman didn’t know how to respond. They hadn’t known each other long, and the mercurial switch in moods startled him. Finally, he reached out and touched Fitzgerald’s wrist. “It’s all right. I’ll help… do what I can.”

Fitzgerald screwed up his face tightly for a second as some complicated emotion wrestled behind it, but then he relaxed and smiled wanly. “Promise?”

Roman nodded.

Later, after Fitzgerald cheered up, he said, “Do you want to see the animals in the wild? I mean, really see them?”

They walked through the long access tunnel that emptied onto a screened observation platform hundreds of yards into the reservation. Fitzgerald held a finger to his lips as they neared the exit, and they crept the last few yards until they were in the open.

Here, the island screened much of the wind, and the rustle of pine filled the night gently, like a steady background of rain in the distance. An almost full moon behind hazy clouds cast a delicate light on the hills around them, the sand glowed albino bright between clumps of salt-grass. Roman started to speak, but Fitzgerald pressed a hand to Roman’s shoulder and shook his head. “They’re just upwind,” he mouthed without sound.

They were only twenty yards away. Dark movement against the sand. It took a moment for Roman to pick out the details in the soft light, the long legs, lean chests, ears up, alert and relaxed. Posture revealed all. He identified the dominant alpha as it stalked through the pack: larger, a lighter gray than the rest with an almost black chest. Lesser males dropped their heads, turned away slightly, tails down, ears dropped. A whole grammar of rank and position in their stance. Roman held his breath. It was his first time this close to wolves outside of a zoo. All of his studies had been on wolves in captivity, on the other side of the glass. Here, nothing separated them but a thin camouflaged netting and a couple of good bounds through the night air.

Suddenly, they all looked toward the platform, their eyes picking up the filmy glint of moon. Roman froze. Fitzgerald’s hand tightened on his shoulder. The tableau remained still for long, long seconds until the alpha trotted to the top of the hill and the rest followed him. The others flowed out of sight, but the big wolf, silhouetted against the horizon’s clouds, gazed back at the netting as if examining the men inside, and, after the evaluation, dismissing them. He followed the pack.

“I’m going with them,” whispered Fitzgerald. He rolled onto his back, stripped off his shirt, unbuckled his pants and removed them and his shoes before Roman could say anything. To Roman’s astonished look he said, “You haven’t done a thing until you’ve run naked with the wolves.”

He raised the bottom of the netting, slipped out and loped up the hill. Roman rose from his crouch until his head brushed the top of the blind. The hazy clouds broke, and the moon light brightened Fitzgerald’s path. For a moment, he paused at the hill’s top looking back, a disturbing vision of white marble poised on the brink. Roman caught himself fingering the top button of his coat.

Later, and for many nights after, Roman dreamed of Fitzgerald standing on the edge of the unknown, half twisted around, beckoning. Sometimes, in the dreams, Roman joined him on the hill, and he’d wake up panting, scared so deeply that once he wept. He didn’t accompany Fitzgerald on a night trip to the reservation again although he was often invited.




Roman stowed a sandwich, a bottle of water and binoculars in a day pack. He considered leaving a note for Sharon, but decided that would be melodramatic. Besides, he thought, with the ferry coming soon, she’d probably never see it.

In the tunnel, green light panels every thirty feet cut the long walk into moments of sickly, pale illumination that turned his skin to weak lime, interspaced by green instances of near total darkness. It was like walking through the endless interior of a many segmented worm.

At the exit, he passed by the case with the tranquilizer guns without taking one.

But the top of every low hill revealed nothing. He swept the landscape through the binoculars, peeking under the trees, studying each rounded back of rock for sign of the missing animals. He found fresh scat and broke it open with the toe of his boot. It was filled with grass. He thought, are they ill? After an hour of crisscrossing the south end of the island and visiting an abandoned den, he hiked to the eastern beach and headed north. Rough gravel crunched on each step. He was below the hills now, and couldn’t see farther inland than the sandy crests only a few feet away, but he figured that here, at least, nothing would smell him, and he could poke his head above the dunes every once in a while to scout the land.




The night they learned the grant would not be renewed, and at the end of the current study period the wolves would be returned to their zoos, they met in the communications hut, where Sharon broke out two bottles of scotch from her bags and proposed a party. After they were all a couple of drinks down, she said, “Damned Philistines think original research is an oxymoron,” then she turned up the music and twirled into the middle of the room to dance by herself. Her blonde hair swirled around her face like a nimbus. She danced with her eyes closed, not really moving to the music, but to some unshared rhythm of her own.

Roman took a long pull out of the bottle, and the heat flowed from mouth to gut in an unbroken line. He was deep into a melancholy, and he pictured the end of the wolves. For decades now their numbers had declined. There were probably too few of them left for a viable genetic pool. The bottle felt cool against his chest; he hugged it close. He pictured the wolves as he’d seen them that night with Fitzgerald, and the dozens of trips that he’d made on his own, and he saw them as a symbol. Wolves were primordial in man’s imagination, he thought. They had stalked cottages deep in primitive European woods, long before the great cities arose and every square mile was tilled and touched and owned. How families must have trembled when the wind rose and the wolves howled. Nothing between them and the savagery of the forest but their prayers and their homes’ thin walls. The fairy tale of the wolf at the door, huffing and puffing and blowing houses down had meaning. Little Red Riding Hood had reason to be frightened, and in real life, no hunter could bring the little girl and her grandmother back alive from the stomach of the beast. There must have been a time, he thought, there must have been a time when it looked as if the forest might win. The wolves would take back what was theirs, and the broken down walls would melt back into the forest floor.

Sharon turned slowly round and round in the middle of the floor. Music filled the hut, and Fitzgerald threw a towel over the desk lamp that gave the only light in the room so that Sharon spun wraith-like in the shadows. After a while, Fitzgerald rose, and they both danced in the darkness of the communications hut.

Drunk, Roman only half watched their body language until he realized that he was seeing all the signals of a mating ritual. Sharon moved slowly, hands open and head back, her throat exposed, and she rolled her head around, kept her heavy lidded eyes half open as she swayed to the music. Her tongue touched her lip, and every turn his way she slowed, holding his eyes for a second before moving away again, every lean a tease and retreat. Her dance said, come and get me, I’m running until you catch me. She was dancing to Roman.

Scotch thrummed like a bass chord in his throat and forehead, and he wished he could write it all down. Of all his time studying gesture, posture and behavior, he’d never felt as if he understood it so well. Sharon might as well be talking to him. He could see it in the tension in her arms, the curl of her fingers, the bend of her knees. She was asking him to dance, in all its metaphorical ways, and he found it interesting. An academic exercise. He felt no urge to stand or to join her, but it fascinated him like a good book, like a successful experiment.

In the concentration of the moment, Roman realized he hadn’t paid attention to Fitzgerald, so solemnly Roman shifted his gaze. He almost giggled; his head felt heavy, and changing his point of view was a ponderous undertaking until he saw Fitzgerald dancing a few feet to Sharon’s side. More of the light fell on him; his face was less shadowed. He too danced as if he heard other music than the tune that poured out of the speakers. A bottle in one hand, Fitzgerald advanced and retreated within a self-imposed box, never moving beyond it, but his dance said he recognized the boundary, and to Roman, Fitzgerald suddenly looked noble and tragic.

A part of Roman recognized his own drunkeness, but even drunk, a little part of him watched from afar, commenting on the moment, and right now the little part said that he was reading too much into what he saw. However, Fitzgerald sliding back and forth on the floor, drinking to hold back the misery of the lost wolves touched him, and he wanted to hold the man. All of Fitzgerald’s theories were to be taken away when the wolves left. They’d never again get a chance like this to study the wolves. Fitzgerald would never again get a chance to reintroduce the wolves to the rural landscapes where they might survive if he could just change their eons old behavior patterns a little bit.

Fitzgerald danced, and his eyes met Roman’s. For a second, Roman felt a cold connection, as if he were reading Fitzgerald’s mind, but the feeling passed, and Fitzgerald was just dancing. Roman watched Fitzgerald gathering himself in movement, speaking volumes of himself and betraying himself as he danced.

And then a little barrier snapped in Roman’s mind. Fitzgerald’s dance was a mating one too. His shoulders rocked back and forth on the fulcrum of Roman’s face. His head wove side to side, always returning his gaze to Roman’s gaze. Fitzgerald’s lips were parted, and Roman could see the glistening tips of the teeth behind them, and when he looked into Fitzgerald’s uncharacteristically shy eyes he could see that Fitzgerald knew what Roman knew. The dance was for him. The invitation was for him. Roman, the dance said, will you move with me in the night?

Shaking, Roman rose; the bottle slid off his chest and shattered on the floor. He could feel the disgust forming on his face. The message he sent wasn’t just a refusal; it was revulsion and fear. Without thinking, he rushed to the door and out of the hut. A hundred feet up the trail, the wind punishing his face with salt spray, and the waves growling on the beach below the cliff, Roman fell to his knees and retched. It all surged out, all that good liquor, and as he coughed against the muscles’ iron hold on his gut, he heard a howl behind him that rent the air. But not a wolf. The howl came from the hut, and it was pained and sick and betrayed.




After hiking for thirty minutes, trudging up the loose sand dunes every few minutes to survey inland, Roman rested on a weathered limb of driftwood at the high-tide line. At the water’s edge dozens of tiny crabs worried chunks of flesh off a decomposing fish. Roman watched while sipping from the water bottle. The ocean reflected the color of the sky, a sullen gray, and beyond the island’s shelter, the wind sheared the tops of waves into white froth. Here, though, the breeze was just a gentle but cold push.

Finding the wolves didn’t really matter, despite what he’d said to Sharon. The grant was dead; the research was over, and no one in ecological management really believed wolves could be introduced back into the wild. Only Fitzgerald had believed it, and for a bit he felt he’d found an ally in Roman, a kindred spirit. All that was left was to discover if there was some kind of change in the wolves. Roman wasn’t worried about research now; he didn’t even think he could get a decent paper out of it, but maybe he could make retribution. Whatever remained of Fitzgerald remained in the wolves.

He couldn’t say goodbye to Fitzgerald, but he could face the judgement of the pack.

He took Fitzgerald’s note out of his pocket. The edges were frayed from continuous handling; he’d read it a hundred times. It said, Dear Roman, A wolf in sheep’s clothing is still a wolf whether it knows it or not. The myth can be told different ways. Maybe the wolf wore the sheep skin to fit in. Maybe the wolf was raised by sheep and didn’t know differently. But don’t be fooled. Wolves are villains in so many of the stories because sheep wrote them. A single wolf truth vanishes in the din of the flock. But that doesn’t mean the wolf has to like it. Yours, Fitzgerald.

Rocks skittered against each other, and Roman looked up. Standing thirty yards away, a single wolf faced him, its ears up, its tail up, tongue lolling out lazily. Light gray, black chest: the alpha male. Water dripped from its head; its belly fur hung in a matted line, and water dripped steadily onto the gravel. Roman thought, it’s been swimming. Wolves don’t swim in the sea!

The wolf stood still for a minute, then lowered its head and the ears pointed forward. Roman scrunched backward on the wood. This was an attack posture. Legs bent, staying low, the wolf stepped toward him stiffly. Suddenly, it charged forward, cutting the distance in two. Roman didn’t move. He closed his eyes and waited for the teeth to take him. And he waited, but nothing happened. He opened his eyes. The wolf had stopped, its front legs lying straight on the ground, its rump in the air, tale wagging, flipping water left and right. It squeaked, a high-pitched cross between a bark and a whine. Then it dashed twenty feet away from him, up the beach, stopped, looked back and charged to the same position.

“What do you want?” Roman said. His voice sounded empty to him and small against the hiss of waves in the gravel.

The wolf cocked its head to the side and whined again. It repeated the dash up the beach and back. Roman stood. Wind pushed against him, and he glanced up. The sky was darkening, and to the east a shimmer of lightning flicked within the clouds. He shivered.

This was not wolf behavior he’d seen before. It seemed sportive, like a game of tag. The large gray waited until Roman stepped toward him, then sprinted to the top of the dune. He flopped onto his chest again, sending a spray of sand down the slope. Mystified, Roman leaned into the dune’s bank, bracing himself with his hand to follow the animal up. The wolf raced out of sight, and a second later peeked over the top again as if to see if Roman were following.

Sand slithered away beneath his feet, and it took dozens of steps to climb the few feet to the top. A wall of dwarf pine filled the gully in front of him. To both sides bare hills rose like shoulders from the sea. The wolf popped out of a narrow gap in the pine, paused until Roman moved toward it, then vanished into the vegetation. Roman got on his knees and looked through the dark arch. He’d have to crawl. He left his backpack on the ground.

It seemed a long way. The strongest sense of deja vu swept over him as he pushed through the pine. He’d been here before, following a playful wolf. The behavior seemed familiar, but he didn’t come up with the connection until the pine opened up, and he could finally stand. There, sitting on their haunches, watching him intently, was the rest of the pack. He saw Fitzgerald in all their eyes, a little bit of Fitzgerald in the tilt of their heads. Fitzgerald resided in the passion of their stares.

Then he figured it out. Not wolves. Wolves wouldn’t ambush, but coyotes would. Clever tricksters, the wolves surrounded him, and the first drops of rain spattered down.




The rain fell. Roman turned a full circle, water running across his cheeks, dripping off his nose. As he faced each wolf, it tucked its head down, dropped its ears back and lowered its tail. It was deference. When he stepped toward the big gray, it too turned slightly away, exposing its neck, showing by posture a lower rank.

The wind sliced through Roman’s wet clothes. He shook against the chill, but he stood in the middle of them until the sky darkened enough to tell him that night was near. Straight across the island, the research center was no more than a couple of miles away.

What message should he take from this? What did it mean that the wolves made him the alpha-male? Was that the lesson that Fitzgerald sent to them through the hours of broadcasting, or was it what they picked up from him directly on those nights he mingled with them? It seemed a kind of forgiveness, a kind of benediction of clemency. Roman had turned away from Fitzgerald, but all was not lost. The wolves forgave him. Roman fell to his knees in relief, and he let the rain melt the letter until the words were unreadable.

Finally, expended and bone cold, he stepped past the first wolf and headed for the shelter of the research center. The wolves that had been lying down stood, and the big gray trotted to a spot in between Roman and his goal.

Roman stopped. The wolf growled deep from the back of its throat; his teeth gleamed.

“I’ve got to go, boys,” said Roman, but the wolf blocked his path, snarling when Roman tried to walk away. Only when he moved back to the center of the pack did the gray lose interest. Roman tried twice more to slip past them, but the reaction was the same. The pack would tear him up if he tried to leave. Night gradually fell; rain continued, and the wind never stopped.

Later, much later, Roman lost track of what direction he should go if he could go. He couldn’t feel his hands anymore, and the little voice in the back of his head that stayed with him when he was drunk told him that hypothermia was setting in, but he didn’t care. Caring took too much energy, and he wasn’t afraid either. He was just tired. Below him, the sand felt soft, so he laid himself on it. He’d quit shivering long ago.

Soon a warm, wet weight pressed itself against him. Another one warmed his other side. He opened his eyes slowly, took a long time to focus, and saw on the crest of the hill looking down, a marble white figure like a naked god in the moon light. Raising his head lethargically, Roman mouthed the name, but as he studied the shape he realized it was the crescent moon. The clouds had broken, although rain still fell, and the wind hustled over him, moaning in his ear. Sand pressed gently against his cheek; he closed his eyes again, understanding the wolves were keeping him warm, and before he slipped into unconsciousness, he knew they loved him. Fitzgerald and the pack loved him. They would stay with him until it was time to jump in the ocean and start that long swim.

And they would never, never let him go.




NO SMALL CHANGE


I used to be able to kill flies.”

“What?”

“Flies, I used to be able to kill them.”

“You brought me to the girl’s bathroom to tell me you used to be able to kill flies, Maureen? I can kill flies.”

The two girls huddled together in a stall. Stagnant cigarette smoke whisped around them like a mist. Maureen sat on the stool, her hands pressed deeply into the blue and gray plaid skirt that was uniform at Mrs. Fennimore’s Finishing School. Leslie, facing her, arms crossed over her crisply starched blouse, leaned against the door.

“Anybody can kill flies.”

“I can still kill them, just not as well.” Maureen, head down, seemed intent on the floor between them.

“I’m ditching Home Ec for you. There had better be more to that than this.”

“You are the only one I can tell. I don’t have any other friends here. No one would understand.” Maureen turned her face up. Her eyes were rimmed red. “Please listen to me.”

Leslie stooped and put her hand on Maureen’s hands.

“I’m sorry. Just be clearer. That’s all. Now what do you mean about not being able to kill flies as well?”

“It won’t do any good to tell you. I’ll have to show you,” she said and stood up. “Find a fly.”

“We’re in the head. No problem.” They pushed through the door together. “There’s one.”

Around the ceiling light flew a large fly, a September fly, fat from a summer of waste food, spilled soft drinks, and whatever other unmentionable things flies feed on.

Maureen pointed at it, sighting down her arm like a pheasant hunter and said “Bang.” It caught fire, fell to the floor, smoldered for a second, and then was just a tiny pile of ash.

Leslie sidled over to it cautiously and stared down for a moment.

“Shit.” She looked at Maureen. “Can you do that every time?” She looked down. “Shit.”

“No, I can’t.” Maureen’s face was a portrait of grief. “Sometimes they don’t even die. They used to go up like firecrackers. When I was eight, there wasn’t a fly within a mile of our house. I went out back, said ‘bang’ and it would sound like the Fourth of July. I didn’t need to see them; I didn’t even have to know they were there, but now—this.” She pointed at the ash.

“You killed that fly. Do you know how incredible that is? You’re a phenomenon. People will want to study you. We can make lots of money. We’ll be more famous than rock stars.” Leslie whirled gleefully.

“No! Why do you think you’re the first to know? Sit down for a second and figure this out. Do you think I want to be a freak? No way! It’s a secret. Only you and I can know.” They moved to the window seat. The bottom panes were frosted to prevent people from looking into the second story bathroom, but the upper panes provided a good view of the commons area. “Besides, at this rate in a few months I won’t be able to do it at all.”

“So what’s the problem? Most people I know can’t kill flies that way and they’re happy. Black Flag works fine for them.”

“Very funny.”

“I wasn’t trying to be funny. You have a strange skill and it’s going away. People live all over who can’t point their fingers at things and make them die. I don’t see the big fuss.”

“The fuss is that I used to be able to do it. It made me different. Some girls can sing. You can play the piano; some are good at English or Math; some are great dancers. This is what made me unique. It gave me power that no one else had.” She put her head down again. “And now it’s going away. I’ll just be a stupid twelve-year-old at this stupid finishing school.”

Another fly, blissfully unaware, buzzed like an airborn rollercoaster in front of them.

“Bang.” It stuttered in the air and fell stunned, on its back, to the floor. Seconds later it started spiraling its legs. Maureen pointed and concentrated mightily.

“Bang.”

This time it puffed into a tiny cloud making a discernable pop, like someone snapping a bubble of chewing gum.

“I don’t suppose you could teach me to do that?”

Leslie gazed at Maureen, who stared back blankly.

“I suppose not. Oh well. Let’s take a walk. Maybe something will occur to us. If you want, we can go down to Dairy Queen, and I’ll buy us chocolate malts.”

They cracked open the bathroom door, checked both ways to make sure it was clear, particularly of Mr. Haverson, who constantly wandered the hallways, and dashed for the front doors. Ten minutes later the two young ladies were seated with malts in front of them. A group of boys from the junior high were in a back booth joking about football practice. The rest of the store was empty so they had chosen a table on the other side of them.

“What are you going to do if you can’t kill them any more?”

“That’s why I wanted to talk to you. Like Mrs. Fennimore says ‘You must put things in perspective.’ But its just not that, Leslie. Everything is changing. Can’t you feel it?” Maureen shrugged her shoulders together as if in the grip of a sudden chill. “I mean you and me, and all the girls in the school. We’re going apart. We’re coming apart. I don’t know what it is but I don’t feel good any more. Losing this thing…” She held up her pointed finger like it wasn’t really a part of her—like it was an alien artifact whose function she didn’t understand. “… is only a side of it. What is happening?”

She sucked up an inch of malt. “I need perspective. Does this mean I’m dying? Will my health go next?”

Leslie looked at Maureen’s drink. “Your appetite seems good.” Leslie laughed, inviting Maureen to join her.

For a moment she held it in, but then she laughed too. “Do you have a temperature?”

“No.” She wiped her face with her sleeve.

“Have you had any hallucinations? Imagined you were Joan of Arc or Queen Victoria?”

“No, of course not.”

“Have you felt an urge to steal dresses off the racks or wear your underwear outside your clothes?”

“Ugh.”

“All right then. You’re not physically sick, and mentally you seem fine. What you need to do then is count up what you’ve got going for you.”

“Like?”

“You’re rich, right?”

“Not really. Dad owns a couple of Mercedes dealerships.”

“Come on.”

“Okay. I’m rich.”

“You’re going to graduate from this dump at the end of this year, right?”

“Yes.”

“You’re probably going to a really nice private junior high like Kingshill, right?”

“Actually, no. Chivingsworth.” Maureen looked much better now, her composure restored as she got caught in her friend’s natural good humor.

“Ooh. I’m impressed.” Leslie took a swallow from her own drink. The boys brayed explosively at some obsenity and she cast a disgusted glance in their direction. “That’s plenty nice enough. So your future is set, right?”

“Right.”

“Besides, has it occurred to you that this one power may be going away so that a better one can come along? Say, an ability to fly, or be invisible, or something really awesome?”

Maureen turned the idea over in her mind momentarily. “I hadn’t thought of that.”

Leslie leaned over the table, locked eyes with her friend and said, “There’s power, and then there’s power. Not all changes have to be bad. Maybe you ought to just wait and see what pops up.”

Maureen contemplated this concept for a bit as they finished off their malts.

Just as they were standing, two of the boys sauntered away from their group and positioned themselves at the end of the girl’s table. One was quite a bit shorter than the other, and both were wearing blue T-shirts with “Knights Football Team” in white on them.

“Excuse me. You’re from the finishing school aren’t you?” said the taller one as he pushed a lock of dark hair from his forehead.

Leslie looked him over coolly. “Yes. Who would like to know?”

The shorter one glanced up at the taller one with an ‘I told you so’ kind of expression.

“Oh, I’m sorry. My name’s Jeff and this is Mark.”

Jeff rushed through his next words. His buddies were all staring at them from their booth across the way, snickering. “Um, we’re on the football team. At the junior high, you know, and we’re sponsoring a dance to raise money—for helmets—and like, we were wondering if you two would like to go.” Leslie and Maureen looked at them expectantly. “To the dance I mean, with us. It’s Saturday in the gymnasium.”

Neither young woman said a word. They sat primly, backs straight, expressions severe, judgmental, as if they were dealing with a lower life form.

“You don’t have to if you don’t want to, and this is probably a surprise since you don’t know us or anything.”

Maureen said, “Thank you. We’ll talk about it.”

The boys looked disappointed for a second, then the short one said, “If you want to go, Jeff and I will be in here tomorrow after school and you can meet us for a coke or fries or something.”

“Perhaps.”

Leslie added, “We might, and then we might not. We’ll have to think about it for a while.”

“Fine. We’ll see you tomorrow then maybe.” They backed up a step each, turned, and marched deliberately to their friends. When they sat down they all began to talk in a low buzz.

“God, do you believe that, Maureen?” Leslie’s eyes were glittering.

“No way am I going to a dance with those guys.”

“The tall one was kind of cute.”

“You really think so, Leslie? He was so sweaty.”

Maureen screwed up her face like she had swallowed something distasteful.

“I think I like sweat.”

“Gross!” Maureen squealed. “Well, what do you want to do?” she said. The boys got up then and walked out. As they went by, Jeff and Mark said goodbye politely, but the rest poked each other in the ribs, saying things like “Nice legs,” and “Oooh baby.” The door finally wheezed shut behind them.

“Of course boys can be pests too,” said Leslie.

“Just like flies.”

They watched the group walk down the sidewalk, then turned to each other and Leslie said, “Obviously, those two are desperate for a date, or they wouldn’t have asked us, a pair of strangers, to the dance. We could go with them and make their day,” she paused, “or we could say no and break their hearts. There’s power and then there’s power. It’s something to think about.”

Maureen considered her reflection in the window superimposed on the retreating boys. “You’re right. Not all changes have to be bad.” There was a moment of silent meditation as that concept sunk in, as they thought about not just these boys, but without realizing it, on a perfect subconscious level, all the boys in their futures.

Then they whispered it together, knowingly:

“Bang.”




THE SAINT FROM ABDIJAN


They say the port of Abidjan is beautiful with new buildings—a bustling, modern city—but when the tugs pulled the cacao freighter in I saw nothing but a long, filthy gray steel deck an inch from my eye. I couldn’t raise my head. I missed the horror in the interior. If I’d looked closely, would I have seen Seydou’s hand on my elbow? Could I have stopped myself from being the tool?

From the time we’d hit the deep sea swell out of Melbourne I’d been sick, and by the trip’s end I was reduced to dragging the thin mattress the Liberan first mate had begrudged me from one slip of shade to the next. The air smelled African hot, but it was cooler than in the hold. No relief, though, now the trip was almost done: the ship’s queasy pitching had been exchanged for uneven pulls from the two tugs.

It made me think of Ireland’s St. Brendan who fifteen hundred years ago wrote a book called Navigation describing his search for the Isle of the Blessed. Some people claimed Brendan discovered the Americas, but he never wrote about sea sickness, so I think he made it up.

I clamped my teeth tight on lunch from three days earlier, and concentrated on remembering I was going to Seguela’s diamond fields to save lives. We’d heard rumor of children toiling in the pits, digging with pikes and shovels for starvation wages. So I told my friends goodbye at Greenpeace Australia where I’d been interning and caught an empty freighter bound for Cote d’Ivorie and the port of Abidjan. You’re too young, they said, too inexperienced. Real activism, I told them, is an individual affair. They shook their heads, thinking my idealism hung on my sleeve. Among the fanatics, I stood out, but I’d always been that way. In first grade I collected crushed aluminum for the poor. My favorite magazine in middle school was the Red Cross’s in-house newsletter. The knowledge someone somewhere is suffering keeps me awake at night. Nothing is distant for me. It’s next door. It’s not religion. I’m not religious, but all my heros are saints.

He’ll mellow when he turns thirty, one said. But somebody has to record abuses. My cameras were buried deep in my duffle, along with a tape recorder and notebooks.

Immigration gave me a bother about my passport—too many stamps in six months. The introductory letter from Human Rights International didn’t carry any weight; neither did the pledge of cooperation from the Seguelan authorities, so I convinced them with smiles that a terrorist or drug runner would not go from America to Greenland to Brazil to Australia and then to Africa. A little cash under the table could have saved me twelve hours, but I preferred not to contribute to civil corruption. They interrogated me in an air-conditioned office high above the street. Everyone behaved civilly, very proper. Gray three-piece suits over white shirts. Red ties. “Stay out of Treichville and Adjame after dark. There are muggers,” the cinder-black custom’s official told me in French much better than mine as he handed back my visa. “What do you hope to do in Seguela?”

“Photojournalism.”

“Watch for the old people.” He grinned politely, white teeth flickering, as he okayed my papers.

I must have looked puzzled.

“Old people. The traditionals. We are near upon Dipri, the new year celebration. It’s a time for magical powers. There will be panther men.”

A dozen skyscrapers blocked the noon light in the window behind him. Even through soundproofed glass, the afternoon traffic rumbled. This was modern Africa, the former Ivory Coast, among the most progressive nations on the continent. Poverty I expected, crime too, but not superstition. I nodded my head and thanked him, almost falling when I stood up. Funny, now I walked on land, the Earth still moved.

A train took me from Abdijan inward to Yamousoukro, about a three hour trip, which I thought would be a pleasant change from the freighter, but brightly dressed Ivorians overcrowded the car, the women in bold printed blouses; the men’s shirts unbuttoned to mid-chest. The windows were down, blowing in swampy air, hot as a sauna, like a steaming washcloth across the face. I breathed through my mouth, pressed between two huge women on a bench seat built for two. The one on my left languidly dipped her hand into a paper bag between her legs to dig out what looked like a dollop of peanut butter and smelled like rancid banana, then smeared it on her gums. She sucked at it for a while before going back to the bag. The one on my right lolled off to sleep as the train pulled from the station and fell against me. For charity’s sake, I supported her. She’d have flopped right to the floor if I moved.

From Yamousoukro, I took a two-hour bus ride to Bouaflé, where a representative from Seguela was supposed to meet me, but he didn’t show up. I decided to wait. The saints were patient. Many worked for years without success. Like St. Francis de Sales, they persevered. In 1600 he decided to convert 60,000 Swedish Calvinists. He brought 40,000 back to the church. I made my duffle into a pillow and rested. By then, late in the evening, there was no transport north until morning. I slept on the depot’s floor between a wall and a bamboo baggage cart. Something in a suitcase a foot from my head kept slithering. I drifted off anyway.

My contact found me in the morning. “Mr. Andrew Baily, of the bleeding heart liberal press, I presume,” he said pleasantly in English with a French accent. I saw his clay-coated boots first. He crouched before me, soiled blue jeans tucked into the boots, flannel shirt without sleeves straining to hold in his gut, sun-leathered face, maybe forty, sunglasses, a Cleveland Indians baseball cap. Brown teeth. “I am Marcel Devoe, of the blood sucking, imperialist European diamond cartel. Assistant to the assistant crew chief for Seguela mining. Can I get you some breakfast?”

He treated me to kedjenou, a chicken and vegetable jumble sealed and cooked in banana leaves. We ate in the depot’s café, sitting in bright orange, molded plastic chairs.

Devoe said, “This is not a good time for you to come. The celebration days are here, and the Mandés and the Wè tribesmen get lazy. They’re from Ghana, you know. No work there. They dig slower the closer we get to La Fête de Diamants.”

I raised my eyebrows.

He struggled for an English word, “A holiday… a vacation day… I do not know the word. On the new year’s day, the employees can keep one diamond they find. It’s a tradition from the DeBeer time.”

“That’s generous,” I said through a kedjenou mouthful. “A diamond for each.”

He smiled. His teeth were discolored.

“No, no, no. One diamond for all, the best one, except the Seguela mines have given nothing but industrial grade stones for years. Still, they hope for another Light of Peace.” He dismissed the hope for a worthwhile diamond with a derisive snort.

“I don’t know that one.”

“The last big stone, 434 carats in the rough, found in Sierra Leone thirty years ago. Nothing like the Cullinan, 3,106 carats, or the Excelsior at 995 carats. You’d think that must be huge. It’s not! The Cullinan was no bigger than a woman’s fist, a little glass potato. But who dreams of those? Diamond mining is ditch digging. So many hundred ore buckets produce so many tiny, flawed stones, only good for saw blades and polishing dust. No, the real money is in production, and the workers give up a good day to hunt for a grand gem to retire on. Listen to them; they already know what color BMW they will park in garages they don’t have. Every hut with a TV and microwave. Stupid workers. If they found such a stone, what makes them think the company would let them keep it?”

“Wouldn’t they?”

He shook his head, as if his mind already lingered on different things. Perhaps he mourned the lost work day.

His car, a rusty little coupé with a Korean name I didn’t recognize, rattled at even low speeds and had no shocks, so every pebble jarred us as we drove north. The de la Maraoué National Forest passed to our west, an impenetrable leafy wall exuding green smells and piercing monkey shrieks. To the east, though, stretched flooded coffee fields punctuated with occasional tin-roofed sheds as far as I could see. Devoe rolled a joint with one hand and held it out to me. I shook my head. He said, “I’m supposed to offer you a bribe, too, so you will write pleasing articles. It’s standard procedure. Money? Drugs? Women? No? Well, I thought not.” He didn’t look surprised or upset.

He waved toward the jungle. “There’s a fortune in timber in there. If you bleeding hearts would leave us alone, we’d be rich men. The entire country used to look like that, impassable with trees. Gold mines with bark.” He pointed his chin at the fields as we passed five children sitting by the road, their black skin splotchy with mud. “Money when they knocked the trees down, and crop money every year since.”

I bit my tongue. My friends were involved in efforts to save the rainforest.

Soon the road climbed as we left behind both the fields and jungle, although vegetation choked every little valley and ravine. Savanna grass covered the hills. Dispirited telephone poles drooped with power lines for many miles, but they vanished behind as the car clattered on. We passed through villages, houses no more than plywood leaning on beat-up frames beneath ubiquitous metal roofs. But I also saw long expensive fences, and winding driveways, leading to beautiful ranch houses, their windows glittering in the mid-morning sun.

We turned west before reaching Seguela, into the high country.

“They ignore the curse, of course,” said Devoe.

“Excuse me?” The land fell away so steeply below my window that I’d been concentrating on what was road and what was air. Devoe drove carelessly, draping his wrist over the steering wheel.

“All the big stones are cursed. Evil follows the big ones. If you could get the diamond without the bad luck, that would be a trick. The man who first stole the Hope Diamond was devoured by dogs. Who would want that? It sank the Titanic, you know.”

“Uh huh,” I said. Tough looking brush, higher than our bumper, filled the middle between the two, ratty ruts our road had become, and it scraped the car’s bottom.

“Yes, an American millionaire owned it, and the Atlantic took him. His granddaughter committed suicide after wearing it.”

“So the workers don’t make enough money, and they hang on for La Fête de Diamants thinking it might save them?” I didn’t figure Devoe would give honest answers if there were abuses, but it wouldn’t hurt to put my cards on the table.

He downshifted to get us through a deep puddle, then jumped into the higher gear when we were through. My feet suddenly felt damp. Water drained through the floorboards.

“My great-grandfather told me when he lived in the Alsase, he plowed his fields with two horses who lived twenty years each. The first year he gave them sugar cubes from his coat pocket to reward them for their work.”

We crested a small ridge, and the land before us flattened. Low mountains shaped the horizon.

“What’s your point?”

Devoe laughed. “He only gave them sugar the first year. For the next nineteen, when he wanted them to pull harder, he put his hand in his pocket. They’d break their backs as long as they thought he’d bring something out. He never did. You know, someone writes a story about the pits every couple of years. It never makes a change. Africa is not like America.”

I made notes, resting the pad against my knee, the pen jumping with every jolt, recording my impressions. Conrad wrote about Africa, but he traveled on the Congo, beating up current in an underpowered boat, the vegetation crowding against his windows. Here, the grass rolled away, spotted with trees and brush. For miles nothing changed: no animals, no people, just hills and curvy road winding between them. We met no other cars.

“Is this the main road?”

“There’s a train and an airport, but it is easier this way for me.” Devoe nodded his head back to boxes piled where the car’s rear seat would have been.

“What is it?”

“A man has to make a living. An assistant to the assistant manager’s job, whew! The paycheck does not keep him in socks. I have family in Europe. They expect money every month.”

We turned a sharp corner around a thick cacao trees stand, and entered Seguela. Crumbling brick facades whipped by my nose, inches away. Pedestrians slipped into doorways as we passed. Then we hit a larger street, crowded with busses and rusty streetcars screeching down the middle. I had no time to form an impression other than dusty age. I saw no shiny thing. As quickly as we entered town, we left, climbing for several minutes on a path that tried to rip the transmission right from the car’s bottom. John the Baptist, the patron saint of roads, would have found nothing to like about this trail. One more good jolt and I figured my head would be on a platter. The clutch clattered while Devoe cursed the car up a last, rock-laden, rutted stretch that would have challenged a four wheel drive vehicle.

“This is the back route. It’s quicker.”

“If we make it,” I said, bracing my hands against the dash.

Dirt ground against the undercarriage, then we topped the hill, heading for the mountains. I didn’t speak. Past Seguela the air grew heavy—more moist or stagnant, as if a thunderstorm threatened, although the skies were clear. Breathing the weighted vapor repulsed me. I wanted our bouncy trip to end. Devoe’s casual dismissal of the workers nauseated me, or maybe it was a persisting effect from the long sea voyage. I shut my eyes and pictured the serene St. Sebastion’s cathedral in Josephine Bay in the afternoon, where the stained glass art glowed and the Chesapeake glittered outside the heavy, wooden doors.

At age seven I saw the cathedral for the first time. My father gave me canned food to put in the basement: creamed corn, tomato soup, mushrooms, asparagus. He stored them there for emergencies. There was a little survivalist in him. Instead, I put the cans in my wagon and pulled it to the Sisters of Hope shelter next to St. Sebastion’s. It took most the afternoon, clicking wagon wheels over concrete sidewalk seams to reach the shelter. Sweat ran down my face.

An elderly nun, her knuckles painfully large, dampened her habit’s sleeve in a fountain and bathed my forehead. I remember the cloth’s smooth coolness; how camomile followed her. She took me into the cathedral, showed me the heavy leaded glass, the wall of martyrs, sun shining through beatified faces. I had never been inside a church, and I wondered if God lived there, but I didn’t see him, only mellow sunlight transformed in colored glass. The nun said, “They were God’s tools. The spirit filled them like empty vessels, and they did God’s work.” She held her hands clasped at her chest.

“My family is atheist.” I didn’t even know what it meant then. “But I want to give these cans to the poor.”

She said, “You’re an absolute saint, child. An absolute saint.” My wagon floated on the way home. I went back often afterwards to do chores for the nuns, and when I wasn’t busy, I crawled beneath the pews, searched the vestibule, peeked in the Father’s private study for some sign of God, but I never found him. I prayed for God to fill me, to make me his tool, but my folded hands were empty when I opened them, and even as a little kid, I thought speaking words to a silent room was ridiculous. The saints were real, though. The devout turned them into paintings and leaded windows.

I saw nothing so moving again until at twenty I visited the Vatican’s library. Morning light pierced the high reaches where motes swirled like tiny angels. Intricately illuminated texts, hundreds of years old, lay open in heavy glass cases. And once again, saints and martyrs stared out, their heads shrouded in halos, their images curiously separate from the background scenes, as if they didn’t belong to the landscapes. These men and women gave all they had to their faith. They persevered in service, a greater good than their own. I rested my fingers on the glass, and, before I left, burned a votive candle for them. “Hail Mary,” I said, “full of grace,” but I didn’t know the rest. To be full of grace. To be utterly outward turned. To do good. It’s corny sounding, I know, but it’s the highest calling. I didn’t believe in God—I saw no evidence for the supernatural—but I believed in good.

We arrived at the mining headquarters at sunset. Sun burnished hilltops, while shadows filled the valleys. The foreman’s shed, an unpainted two-story building with plastic sheets for windows leaned against a sandy bluff. Below, huge pits tore into the grass and brush. Sterile dirt piles, plantless and cut through with erosion channels, surrounded each pit. Devoe parked our car beside one, the sloped sides falling twenty feet down to a lumpy and muddy bottom that reached a hundred yards to the other edge. Dirt crumbled under my shoes, so I backed away.

I couldn’t see the latrines, but I could smell them. My nose wrinkled as I pulled my duffle bag from the car.

Devoe shouted a French phrase at workers below. Some looked up, but none waved. I hadn’t noticed them at first; they were dirt colored, and moved slowly, like animate rocks, bent over, digging with picks, dumping pebbly soil into bags beside them. A worker—I couldn’t tell the age or sex—slung a bag over a shoulder and climbed toward us, one hand pressed against the ground for support.

“They take the ore to the stream to wash it,” said Devoe. “Shaker boxes separate worthless material from the diamonds. Maybe we find a couple thousand carats a year. Last year the company made 73 million francs from this pit… um… about $120,000 American.”

The thin-limbed worker pushed toward the top, every step up resulting in a half-step slide back. A yard from the edge, the worker looked at us; a girl, maybe twelve or thirteen years old. I couldn’t tell; she was boy-slender but tall. Mud dappled her face, and her eyes looked tired. Very wide, and tired, as if she needed to sleep for a year.

Devoe stood back, his arms crossed on his chest. “The biggest diamond we found last year was just a half carat, not gem quality.”

I offered a hand to help her up. She stared at it for a long time, not moving, a hand jammed into the dirt, the other clenched around the bag’s top. Then she reached for me. Her fingers were callused and hard-ridged, almost stone themselves. “Merci,” she said.

“Be careful of that one, Bailey. She thinks she’s a shaman.” Devoe winked at her although she had looked away from him.

The bag may have weighed more than she did. She walked around the car to a path along the bluff’s base. A stream burbled in the background below a constant rattling. Later I found out these were Devoe’s fourteen shaker boxes, three feet wide and eight feet long. Water poured in one end where the workers dumped their bags. Old men rocked the boxes from side to side, washing away dirt and separating the sand from the occasional diamond, shiny chips that looked like quartz or hazy glass.

“One day we’ll find a big diamond, and I’ll be quit of this place,” said Devoe. He took a folding table from the car’s trunk and set it on the uneven ground. Then he tore the top from a box in his car. Batteries filled it. “I make more selling these than my salary.”

“Batteries?”

“Twenty kilometers to Seguela from here, and no other manager thinks to bring back batteries. These people all have a radio or a tape player or those little hand held video games. They don’t mind my markup.” He grinned his brown smile. I wondered when he’d last seen a dentist.

The girl came back, her bag empty, and trudged past Devoe as if he weren’t there.

“Her name is Seydou. Hey, witch doctor Seydou. Show the foreigner your scars, eh?”

She turned at the pit’s top and spat French and a dialect I didn’t recognize at him. He lifted his hands, palms up, eyes wide and mock-innocent, as she slid down the slope toward the other workers filling their bags. In the pit a child set torches in cast iron sleeves on the ground, igniting each with a lighter he wore around his neck.

“She’s beautiful, no? If you are lucky, she will show you tribal marks. They’re on her backside. I’ve seen them more than once. Yes I have, I’ve seen them.” He licked his lips and rolled his eyes.

By the time I thought to take pictures, darkness had risen. Torches flickered in the pit, belching gasoline odors. Shadows moved: workers, the new shift, digging, filling bags, toting them one by one to the stream for washing. Beyond, in the hills, other lights pulsed sluggishly. Devoe told me the company ran fifty-six pits like the one at our feet. Silent blacks formed a line ending at his table. Men, women, children. Many children, underfed, muddy clothes. I wondered how they afforded radios. Most wore the same outfits: canvas shorts, short sleeved T-shirts, all mud-stained. Nothing like the colorful prints the natives displayed on the train. Women wore scarves tied over their hair, or braided it into a dozen tight strings. They slid small papers across the table to him, then he counted out batteries, sometimes clinking them together like dice. Mentally, I took notes.

None looked up. Their hands dangled at their sides. When they bought their batteries, they vanished into the darkness.

“Where do they go?” I said.

Devoe waved behind him, encompassing half the night. “Villages back in the bush. Don’t go there. At least not during Dipri. These are Wé tribesmen. I told you. They walked here from Ghana. It’s not the twentieth century there.”

“I want to see.” If I was going to accomplish my mission, I’d need documentation. If what I suspected was true, I’d find indentured servitude, an obvious arrangement. The tribesmen moved to the pits for work, where the company provided food, clothing and shelter. They were charged more than they could earn, so they fell behind until they had to trade away wages they wouldn’t earn for months for today’s goods. When the debt became impossible, they offered their children’s work. The basic con. Amnesty International ran seminars on it.

Devoe shook his head. More batteries came from his box in exchange for scrip. The line shortened. A face at the end caught my eye. Seydou looked at me, eyes much older than twelve or thirteen. No expression. Unblinking. I raised my hand for a tentative wave. She didn’t move at first, then she lifted her head in acknowledgment.

“You’ll need a guide. You already know Seydou. I’ll have her take you in the morning. There’s a room in back for you, and food in the kitchen.” He said something to Seydou in the same indecipherable French hybrid. She answered back, her tone curt and dismissive. When she passed her note to him, he grabbed her wrist, his hand looking huge on her delicate arm. He forced her hand over and pushed an extra battery into it. After he let go, she dropped the batteries into her pants pocket. She didn’t walk away from the table though. Without looking away from him, she licked her palm and wiped the dirt off her cheeks, one at a time, a deliberate gesture. The whole performance looked prideful and insulting. She licked slowly, staring, then rubbed the dirt.

“Come,” she said to me in clear French.

Devoe said to my back as I followed her, “Make sure you see her scars. It’d be a pity to travel so far and miss a treat like that.”

In the room Seydou showed me to, I found a mattress, a near duplicate of the one I’d used on the freighter, except not as clean. A good shaking freed several nasty looking bugs and a suspicious waft of old urine.

Seydou picked up one of my books I’d dumped from the duffel, Butler’s Lives of the Saints in French. She thumbed to the illustrations. “Are you Christian? A Missionary? You don’t look like one,” she said, without looking up.

“No, neither. I read it for the stories.” I straightened my clothes on the table, worried suddenly that she’d find my possessions ridiculous. “I don’t believe God exists, actually. The saints and martyrs are inspirational.”

She shut the book crisply and replaced it on the table, as if she’d come to a conclusion about me. “Funny book for an atheist.”

I raised my estimate of her age. Her eyes, after all, were so much older, and the vocabulary didn’t sound young. Still, she was only a child, and an exploited one at that.

Seydou leaned against a wall then slid down so she sat on her heels. I offered her the mattress: I’d sleep on the floor. She shook her head. Obviously she intended to spend the night that way.

I was so tired, I didn’t argue. A dirty mattress is better than none. St Francis of Assisi may have slept on an oak board most his life, but I’m not so resolute. My blanket went over it. Daytime air stifled the room. Getting cold didn’t worry me. My coat made a good pillow. I turned off the battery lamp Devoe had given me and shut my eyes. I thought Devoe intended me to have sex with her. He sickened me.

Through the walls came the picks’ muted blows. The brook bubbled, and the shaker boxes rattled. It was almost soothing. I wondered if they worked all night. Then, from far away, a thin shriek. I bolted upright, straining my ears. It came again, a weird, wavering, thready scream on a human throat’s raw edge.

Torchlight leaked between the room’s rough boards. I couldn’t see Seydou, but her eyes glistened. She turned her head, and I could see her in profile, a silhouette cut out across the wall. “Tomorrow is Dipri.” She said. “There will be panther men.”

Much later than I would have thought, I fell asleep, dreaming of a huge diamond in the ground, a bloody lump wallowing in bloody mud. Devoe said, “Bad follows the big stone, and bad will find it.” I reached to pick it up, then dogs began to howl. They were behind me, running closer. Their hard nails clicked against rock. In the dream I knew, they were coming to eat me.

As far as I could tell, Seydou did not move all night. Her chin rested on her chest, but she still leaned against the wall. When I got up, her eyes flickered open. We shared a thin porridge and cold coffee. Outside, someone shouted, and there was chanting. I cleaned my plate and walked from the building to the pit’s edge.

Beneath me, the workers sat in a large circle, talking. Unlike yesterday, many wore bright clothes. None had picks. How were they to find their diamond if they didn’t have the tools to dig? Devoe manned his table with batteries spread out like fat seeds, but no one lined up. “I won’t sell a thing on Dipri,” he said spitefully. “They’ll move no ore on the company’s behalf either. When you write your report, you be sure to include we allow them this luxury. You social activists are all of a type. Because the pay is low, or the children work, or we work on weekends, you assume we are brutes. This is not Europe or America. You ask them. They are glad to be here.”

He rolled batteries beneath his hands. “You’ll see when you go to the village. Be sure to show him, Seydou, and remember I warned you not to go.”

I’d slung a camera bag over my shoulder, strapped a canteen to my waist and packed some granola among my notebooks. Seydou led as we walked around the pit and headed toward the forest above the compound. Already the sun pounded with moist power. Wispy tendrils eddied off pools in rock hollows, and now that we were beyond the latrines, the air smelled of green vines and mossy undergrowth. Seydou took long strides, her dark legs eating distance.

I thought about African saints; most were martyrs in the north. St. Zoticus, St. Victurus, St. Ammon who died with forty-four other Christians in Membressa. The Romans slaughtered dozens in the early years. St. Theophilus and Helladius were killed by being thrown into a furnace. How did they do it? Did they think they saw God at the end? What would it take to face the furnace?

I argued with a man once who claimed Jesus couldn’t be in heaven because he committed suicide. He made an analogy: if a man stands in a highway, knowing a truck is bearing down on him, and he does nothing to save himself, then he killed himself. Jesus, he said, knew crucifixion was coming and did nothing to save himself.

I said there is no philosophic intent in suicide. A martyr dies for a cause. Suicide is self-serving. Martyrdom is selfless. Intent makes the martyr. But isn’t it at least a kind of death wish? he said. Why seek death? I don’t know. It could be a death wish. My friends at Greenpeace accused me of as much when I left. “Lone activists don’t come back,” someone told me. “They just disappear.”

But I didn’t feel on the way to my death walking behind Seydou. The sun was still the sun, though a little hotter than I liked, and the good ground felt solid beneath my feet. Nothing appeared any different here than it did in Abdijan or Sydney or Santiago or Chicago. It’s a part of Earth’s wonder: at the same time New York literati gather to toast some poet’s latest book, down the street cancer kills a young woman in the oncological ward, while a block away a seventeen-year-old basketball player passes an Algebra test for the first time, while across the globe a child who thinks she’s a witch doctor digs for diamonds in the day and is molested by the assistant to the assistant crew chief at night.

Same planet, different worlds.

Seydou led me on a trail through the brush. Higher on the hills, the ground was dry, dusty and porcelain hard. Animal musk, oxen or cattle I supposed, mixed with hot ground.

Seydou said “Where are you from?”

I’d been to so many places in the previous years, I wasn’t sure how to answer. “I’m from Abdijan, and I’m here to help.”

She nodded emphatically as if she knew what I was talking about. What would she take from that? I wanted to prevent the child labor? Surely not. Or I was investigating Devoe?

I asked her how many children worked in the pits. She shrugged her shoulders. “All of them. Have you seen Dipri before?”

“No.”

“Do not talk to anyone. They will ignore you.” She stopped on the trail, and I almost ran into her. “Are you a good man, like your saints? They say God used them. Would you be a tool for good?”

A sweat sheen glistened on her face. Sometime before we’d left, she had cleaned herself and changed. Where I thought she was skinny before, I saw wiry strength. “Yes, I would. That is why I’m here,” I said without hesitation.

“I thought so. I can tell. Devoe does not like you, you know? He mocks you when your back is turned. That speaks well for you.”

I mulled that over. It didn’t bother me Devoe didn’t like me. He was a part of the problem, the lower, brutish part that implemented policies formed in some distant, clean boardroom by men who never went to where their policies ruined lives, but a part just the same. It did make me think I should watch Devoe. After all, if my report did any good, he could lose his job, perhaps even be arrested.

“Thank you,” I said. Ahead I saw buildings, not the tin-roofed ones I’d seen everywhere between Abdijan and Seguela, but sturdy mud-walled houses with darkly thatched roofs. On the first house we passed, a humped thatch pile turned to watch as we went by, and I realized someone was in it.

Seydou noticed. “It is a panther man. He will come down soon and take part in the ceremonies.”

I walked backwards for a few steps, watching him, afraid he might leap from the roof. What, exactly, was panther-like in the panther men? His eyes peeked out beneath thick, dried leaves. Some strands had been braided into circles above his head. But other than his eyes, which I hadn’t seen at first, and his hands poking out from the costume, I wouldn’t have known he was human if he hadn’t moved.

“They are not civilized anymore,” she said. “They spend seven months in the bush, living as wild animals, to prepare for Dipri. They search for the animal spirits. They search for God too, Baily, like you.”

She baffled me. How could she come to that conclusion from a book and a short conversation?

The Wè village marked the boundary between Seydou’s universe and mine. Even the sun’s quality seemed altered. Colors sharpened. Nothing seemed fuzzy. A fly landed on a bucket twenty feet away, each leg distinct and individual. I felt I could identify that particular fly if I saw it again. In a swarm, I could pick it out. For the first time in my life, I felt as if I were an alien. The village operated in a different dimension. Only Seydou acknowledged my presence. Only Seydou knew I stood there, but I was invisible to the rest.

A woman staggered by us, bumping into a wall, stumbling for a moment, then going on.

“What is wrong with her?” I said, truly rattled.

Others walked around the village in the same condition. We were in the center of thirty or forty houses where there was a well. Their eyes bulged blankly, and their postures were contorted. Some moaned. Others babbled in Dioula, a dialect in this part of the world I didn’t understand.

“She is possessed by sékés. They control our bodies. Sometimes there are self mutilations, but no pain.” Seydou sought for the proper word as we wove between other villagers, some who seemed fine. A young man smiled at Seydou, and she smiled back. “The sékés are beneficent spirits. Some come from the forest, and from the river and mountains. We hope this Dipri to attract a diamond sékés.”

She sounded reasonable. Intelligent. Well spoken through accent. “You do not believe in these spirits, surely. This is hysterical behavior.” I pointed to the woman who’d bumped us. She thumped into a wall, turned and went the other way.

“And how long have you been seeking God?” Seydou said enigmatically.

“I’m not seeking God.”

Her mood shifted, became dark. “This is not good, here. The company does not care for us. We don’t have schools. We don’t have medicine. During droughts, we suffer. Mothers dry up and their children die. Our elders are buried without ceremony. But we listen to radio. In Seguela, we have seen television. Some of us have gone to schools and come back. We do not have to live like this. We need the price out.”

“A diamond?” I focused my camera on a woman in a one piece dress. Barefooted, cheap plastic gold earrings, close cropped hair; she walked with a limp; one shoulder drooped, as if she suffered from a stroke. She ran into a man seated in the road. He didn’t react to the blow. She almost tripped, then continued her unbalanced walk away. “Maybe you don’t want one. Devoe says bad follows the big stones.”

She said, “And bad will find one.”

Startled, I put my hand on her arm. Those were the words from my dream.

“Everybody knows the stones are cursed. How can a good people find a big diamond without bringing the curse too? It has always been the problem,” she said. “Here, come up and we can see the ceremonies.”

We climbed stairs onto a small platform overlooking the street. I saw several others like it in the village, but I never learned what function they served. In the meantime, it was a good place to watch where the possessed wouldn’t run into us.

Soon a sort of parade formed. Several houses up the street a crowd gathered, chanting, moving to the chant’s rhythm. They made their way toward us, a hundred villagers. A panther man, brandishing a thick-headed club, scuttled by, his leafy outfit rustling. He threatened an old couple, and they flattened themselves against a wall. Some in the parade wore costumes and masks. The masks… oh, the masks were arresting: black helmets that covered the face, white shells in lines striping the head or outlining the mouth, or pointing out around the eyes. And red tassels dangling from their chins or lining the foreheads. Their bodies too were striped in white and black. A giant rose up from the crowd. I swallowed a scream. Seydou looked at me and smiled. A man on stilts, wearing a grass skirt, red and black pants to where his knees would be, and blue cloth to his feet, walked among the revelers.

Five dancing, muscled men painted in black and white proceeded the parade, leading it to the our platform. At first I thought they were performing for me, but they weren’t. They looked up, but through me as if I didn’t exist. They performed for Seydou. She stood beside me, her hands on the rail, nodding as they danced. Who was she? Maybe she did act as a shaman to these people. I felt as if I’d entered a cathedral and stood beside the priest. I almost expected her to raise her hands in benediction.

A young girl, wearing a beautiful white-feathered headdress came from the crowd—she might have been eight years old—and joined the dancers. One dancer bent down, forming his hands into a cup; she stepped into it, and he stood, sending her into the air, high above their heads. Two other dancers caught her, bouncing her up again. She spun back to the first who now had a partner. The men tossed her back and forth to the crowd’s applause. Every flight changed. Gravity didn’t hold her. She spun, flipped, rotated backwards, all with long limbed grace. Then, the fifth man stepped into the space between them. The girl flew over his head. He pulled a narrow knife from his waistband, holding it high. The girl bounced back, her arms extended, her back arched, as if in a swan dive. As she reached her peak, the knife tip appeared to touch her. I held my camera at my chest, afraid to raise it to my eyes.

She flipped, kissed the knife as she went over; he appeared to catch her on knife point, to lift her up. The villagers clapped and chanted. The sun beat down and their feet raised dust. My camera dropped to the rail, stopped by my neck strap. I would have fallen; my heartbeat flooded my face, pulsing in my ears, but Seydou touched me. “She’ll be fine,” she said.

Then, the girl sprung from two of the dancers in the other direction, landing on her feet. The knife man howled, his eyes rolling back. He staggered once in a wide circle, his knife blindly in front, and the crowd retreated.

“This is good. The sékés visit him. It means our quest will go well if a dancer receives a spirit.”

The man howled, his back distorted, eyes unfocused. He waved the knife, edge careless, and it caught him on the upper arm, opening a long cut. Skin flapped while blood ran to his elbow. As he twirled, the knife passed by his face, and he seemed to see it for the first time, as if it wasn’t in his hand before. He stood below us, his head level with knees, two feet away. The knife came down, rested on his belly. I could smell his sweat, he posed so close. He looked down at the knife, watching it touch him, and he became very still. The crowd hushed. The knife moved, almost on its own; the dancer did not appear to be in control. It rotated out, so the point stayed on his stomach. He gripped the handle with his thumb on the end, and the blade entered him. Two or three inches disappeared. He cut a slit to the side, then dropped the knife without reaction. No pain displayed. No moan. Blood soaked his shorts; it washed down his leg, over white paint.

I stepped back, chills rushed in my back, goosebumps everywhere, my skin as cold as stone; my gut tightened. The sun, though, still pressed down, sharp-edged, flaming tiny reflections from earrings, from the knife at his feet. Dust caked in my mouth.

He reached into the cut, pulled out a section of his own intestine, then turned to the crowd. They moved in. When he fell in contorted rigor, they caught him.

“He’ll be fine, too,” Seydou said. “They will rub his wound with herbs so he will heal without infection.”

Everyone chanted, bouncing to the rhythm, the heads rising and falling like waves, and it felt as if I were on the ship again, a deep sea swell moving through me. Seydou left the platform and walked into the crowd; they parted to make room for her. She waited for me, then directed me from the village.

I’m not very old, but I’ve been places. I’ve seen things most people have never seen, but I’ve never felt anything like Dipri: people bouncing around me, calling out words, chanting; I heard pattern in the chaos, and they pressed between the houses. Some laughed and chattered, but beneath it was their feet sounds moving down the path, and Seydou’s hand on my back, keeping me in line. A woman bumped me, her eyes roved through the space I occupied, never pausing. She couldn’t see me. Again I felt as if I’d stepped onto another planet. I didn’t belong. Some other day, perhaps, but not today as they walked and danced toward the diamond pit.

It had taken twenty minutes to walk to the village. No time passed before we were at the raw gouge again, over the edge, sliding toward the bottom. The huge pit held us all, the entire village gathered in the middle. They jostled me, but Seydou kept her hand on my back, pushing now, moving to the center. I didn’t feel afraid, but it was as if I’d lost volition. Somewhere between the time when I’d ascended the platform and now, I’d surrendered myself to the day. Villagers’ sweat-damp skin rubbed by me, boys, men, girls, women, the elderly, dancing in the pit. Here their feet dug into mud. Steps splashed. Mud splattered to their knees; on some, it stained their shirts, smeared their faces. People I ran into turned to look, but I had become a space in the crowd; their eyes grew wide. Seydou said in French to them, “It’s fine. Don’t worry,” then she spoke in Dioula.

A voice rose above the chants, swearing. “Whores, you black sons of bitches! Let me go.” Heads turned in that direction. Seydou’s final push brought me to the center, a cleared area ten feet wide. I stood in the middle, Seydou behind me. Two burly men held Devoe between them, pinning his arms to their chests. He roared something in another language. It might have been German, but it sounded obscene. Then, he saw me. “Baily, tell them to let me be.” His face twisted in fear.

Around us the villagers pressed in close, quiet now and intent. Seydou moved beside me, her face shining, then she handed me the knife the dancer had used to cut himself, pointing it toward Devoe who stood a foot away. The closest villagers leaned back. The air crackled. Voices murmured. A man said, “Ça plane!” I didn’t understand. It floats? He looked at my hand. “Le couteau Ça plane!” It means, “The knife, it floats.”

The man’s eyes rolled up to their whites, and he passed out, sinking to the ground. Their stares were on the knife. In the sun, in the glare, I couldn’t see my hand, but the blade stood out, solid and sharp. Had I really disappeared?

Seydou said something. I didn’t get it. I shook my head. She repeated herself, and I thought I understood the words, but they didn’t make sense.

What was I doing there? I wish I could give you the dislocation, the weirdness, how removed from my experience. My life had been spent trying to ease suffering, to calm my sleep so I wouldn’t think about pain a half a world away. But how could I help here? Where did evil reside? Who suffered now? Devoe begged with his eyes.

Seydou said in my ear, “Bad follows the big stone, and bad will find it. Remember, you did no bad.” She licked her palm and wiped Devoe’s cheek; he looked at her without comprehension.

I knew what she intended: I was to kill Devoe, with the knife heavy and blood-sticky in my hand. They wished to avoid the curse. Why would she think I would do this? I put my arm down and stepped back. “No,” I said in English. “This is not for the good.” No one reacted to my words; it was if I’d not spoken. Their eyes locked on the knife. I turned to walk away… and I turned… and nothing happened. My skin cooled, but not as if a breeze came up. More like a cold liquid filled me. An interior cold. The knife came up, dragging my arm with it. Then it flew forward. For an instant, as I lunged toward Devoe, I wondered if my eyes bulged blankly. Was this a sékés?

Something inside him grabbed the blade, a muscle spasm; the knife twisted in my hand, then it pulsed. His heart beat through the handle, and all become wet. My feet were wet. Blood covered my wrist, splashed on the ground; I tasted it on my tongue, coppery and warm. Devoe’s mouth opened as if to speak. Instead, he coughed, lightly, a pink froth on his lips; I barely heard it. He convulsed, tearing the knife from my hand. The men laid him back, the knife a black and silver cross sticking from his stomach’s Golgotha.

Whatever filled me poured out. It fled through my fingers, through my feet.

I rubbed my hand on my pants. What I wanted to do then was kick off my wet shoes and pants. He was on me, touching my skin, squishing between my toes.

Seydou pushed me back and knelt. At first I thought she prayed. I held my hand before me; the palm was clean, but red marked the creases in my fingers. She dug at Devoe’s feet, where the blood had fallen; she scooped out rocky dirt and placed it in a pile to her side. It oozed, and the ooze was blood. She scooped again, then sat back, still holding the gruesome handful, and I could see it in the hole: a red glint. I knelt beside her, placed my hands on the ground. In the tiny pit’s bottom, the sun reflected off a lumpy glass ball the size of a ping pong ball. Blood marked it, and bloody mud surrounded it. For a second, I thought it beat, like a heart, a throb I felt through my palms: once, twice, the mud swelled and receded, then it was still. Seydou dropped the dirt. She cupped the rough diamond so it rested in her hand, then stood, holding it out from her.

“It is done,” she said. The celebration began. Shovels appeared. They dragged Devoe away, buried him deep in the pit’s side. They danced and chanted and sang. More were possessed, and there was much running into each other. Among them all, the panther men stalked, and people gave them room to move, gave them the jungle respect necessary to men who sacrificed their humanity for seven months to live with animals.

Seydou came to me in Devoe’s car. When I could not find the keys, I’d put my head down on the steering wheel and waited. I didn’t care if they killed me. It didn’t matter, because I couldn’t get the knife’s shape from my head. Devoe’s pulse remained in my wrist, transmitted through the killing blade.

She spoke through the passenger’s window. “Bad follows the big stone, and bad will find it.”

The hard plastic steering wheel had become warm beneath my forehead. A single blood spot marked my pants above my left knee. “So you brought a curse upon yourself,” I said heavily.

“We did no bad,” she said. “We didn’t kill him. You held the knife.”

“So the curse comes to me.” I didn’t care. The conversation was irrelevant.

She said, “Intent makes the murderer. I needed you to hold the knife because you weren’t us.”

I didn’t know if what she said was true. Was there no intent? When good men do nothing, evil flourishes. I held the knife. I didn’t move it myself, but was I sorry when it sped home? Devoe died. They didn’t even steal his batteries. I raised my head and looked apathetically into the pit. The villagers had gone, walked away or turned into wisps. Who could know?

Seydou reached into the car, touched my cheek with her knuckles. It was opposite from what she had done to Devoe. It felt as if she were rubbing something onto it. “We have our price out. The debts will be paid, and my people will not work the mines again. We will recover our relatives, the ones buried in the fields, and find a better place for them. You have done much good here. I had a vision a man would come to us from Abdijan.”

She backed away. “I can give you something too. We found a diamond today. A big one, and it will have no curse on it. You should think about how we found it, how it came to us.”

I thought about the knife in my invisible hand. The pouring blood. Was the diamond there before Devoe died, or did his death bring it? For a moment I saw his blood mixing on the ground, and the stone shaping itself. Even as Seydou dug toward it, the mud coming together in its perfect form.

She said, “Magic works. It is a rare thing for a man to see who does not believe. But if there is magic, Bailey, if there is magic, isn’t there a chance there is God too? The saints were God’s tools. He acted through them. Today you were a saint for us, the saint from Abdijan.”




ARK ASCENSION


Ark Ascension orbited hundreds of miles above the mutagen infested Earth. Rotation created a one-grav interior in the seven- mile long, seven-mile diameter tube where genetically uncorrupted animals roamed forty-nine square miles of sculpted, planted and artificially lit landscape.

Martin tended the sun.

During the day he plotted ionization graphs, watched for ultraviolet and infrared variances, checked thermal output against projected goals and wrote a report about the largely automated processes. He checked the news one more time. The wolf had not whelped.

At dusk he left his east-end office where stars slowly revolved in one window and seven miles of bluffs, hills and trees stood in the other. Pine smells and wet leaves met him. Gravelly dirt crunched beneath his shoes. The door’s seams vanished into the wall. He took a deep breath and shivered.

The plasma sun dimmed in the west: an Ascension sunset. The sun didn’t disappear below a horizon, but reached the end of its seven-mile trek, then faded as the gasses cooled. A mile above Martin, a hazy moon flickered on to start its night long trip to the western end. He rubbed his upper arms, wishing he’d worn a coat.

He checked his wrist monitor linked to the plasma track and nodded. The moon produced no heat, but it lighted the interior that otherwise would be black as a cave, without a single star to break the inky tapestry.

To the north, a wolf howled. Martin tried to spot it. He wondered if it was the pregnant wolf’s mate. The land sloped up both left and right, but the trees slanted with the slope until they appeared to be horizontal spikes poking from distant cliffs. Then the cliffs continued in a great arc, completing the world’s roof above him. Beyond the moon in the clear evening air, he thought he saw movement. Deer, maybe, or elk; there was a small herd of each, but at this distance it was unlikely. Probably shifting shadows. Not the animals. He seldom saw them, although nearly a thousand roamed the artificial environment. A dozen biologists observed them, of course, and geneticists tested for mutagens, ever vigilant for contagion. Martin didn’t see the scientists much. Their haunted faces and creepy depression bothered him. They acted like the Earth had died. “Catastrophic species shift” they called it. Nothing remained the same, except here in Ark Ascension and the four other Arks just like it.

Martin avoided the crew, fifteen couples, twenty-three unmarried adults and thirteen children. He spent his time at the zero-G axis, fine tuning the sun, tweaking magnetic containments, experimenting with plasma physics.

Sunset and moonrise brought him to the surface. A zoologist, Dr. Kette, the only single parent on board, and her daughter, Robyn, used this observation area too. The door’s mechanical whisper behind told him they were there.

“It’s cold, Mom,” said Robyn, an eight-year-old whose rounded cheeks, dark eyes and a serious expression mirrored her mother.

“Winter time, dear. The animals and plants need the seasons to stay healthy.”

Robyn leaned against her mother’s leg. “It makes me sad. The trees are bare.”

“Not the evergreens.”

The sun’s dull remnant winked out. Only the moon cast light, a cool, silvered sheen that shimmered the grass. Martin took a few steps away from the wall. If he didn’t look up, the illusion nearly fooled him, a full moon on foothills. In the hollows, fog eddied and the temperature dropped. Frost would soon coat rock and branch, bush and earth.

“Can’t you make the sun warmer, Martin?” said Robyn. “Can’t we always have summer?”

Surprised that she’d spoken to him—generally their evening pilgrimages were silent—he said, “Most of the heat comes from the ground…”

“As I’ve explained,” said Dr. Kette. She sounded sad too. Martin knew that like the other women she wanted to have more children, but the mutagen hadn’t been identified. No one knew if her babies would be born human. She didn’t know if she’d been isolated in time.

“There’s no snow,” said Robyn. “How can we have winter without snow?”

“We’re in a spacecraft. It can’t snow here. We’ll still have Christmas though. We’ll decorate the apartment.” Dr. Kette didn’t sound convinced. “We don’t need snow for Christmas.”

Robyn stamped her foot. It was half-hearted. Martin knew she couldn’t really throw a tantrum. She was too nice a child for that.

“We can’t even put up colored lights! Four days until Christmas! No snow and no lights.” Robyn’s tears were real.

Dr. Kette sat on the ground beside her. “I miss them too.”

Embarrassed, Martin moved farther away. He’d never had a family. Too much lab time. But the image of Robyn leaning against her mother affected him. He wanted to hold her too, to tell her it would be all right. Dr. Kette cried also. Mother and child displaced, no different from the animals wandering beyond.

After a bit, Martin approached, touched Dr. Kette on the shoulder. “You guys will freeze if you stay out here.”

The woman looked up at him. “We really are a long, long way from home.”

Martin couldn’t do anything about snow. At 5,800 feet to the Ark’s center, there wasn’t air enough for clouds. Winter ground fog was common though. In the fall and spring, when the transition between the day’s heat, the night’s temperature drop and the humidity was just right, it drizzled for a few minutes in the morning, but no snow. He thought about Robyn crying.

A crew meeting the next morning discussed the upcoming holiday. A party was proposed. Debate followed, a dispirited affair. The head of research argued, “Even if we are in exile, we can celebrate—we need a celebration.”

“What is there to be joyful about?” countered Dr. Roam, the head of the medical unit, his lab coat meticulously pressed, his hair combed straight back and tight against his head, like a helmet. “It’s ghoulish for us to be merry while our families on Earth suffer.”

Martin sat in the back of the conference room. He thought about the deterioration of the news. Before they’d left, the worst of the mutagen births clustered in pockets. California suffered, as did Canada’s western coast and Alaska. Martin had heard stories of monstrous polar bear cubs, mewling in the snow, hairless, deformed, abandoned by their mothers. The Midwest and the East were untouched. So the pattern continued the world over: some areas hit hard, others were not. The mutagen spread slowly; it had taken twenty years to get this far. For twelve years the Arks were built, and then, a year ago January, populated with animals from the untouched areas. The crew came from areas with no unnatural births.

As if waiting for the occupation of the Arks as a signal, the mutagen’s progress accelerated. No place was free of it. From the Ark they watched the fear rise. It built. Cities burned, and there were no uncorrupted births. Fish or fowl, beast or man, the babies were not right. Most died, but more horribly, some lived. The crew could hardly bear to look at the pictures.

Against the back wall, the children sat. Maybe they are the last young ones we’ll see, thought Martin. Maybe they’re the end.

Someone else said, “The animals are sterile. Even the rabbits have had no litters. Not even lab mice. We haven’t saved anything by coming here. We should be in fully equipped laboratories searching for a cure. Running away solved nothing.”

People muttered to each other, while the Captain waited for someone to raise their hand.

Dr. Kette said, “We expected most animals would lose a breeding season. That’s a well documented effect of dislocation. It’s too soon to tell, and there is the wolf. She should deliver soon.”

Dr. Roam said, “Wolf pups would prove nothing. Even if they’re good, it’s only a matter of time before the mutagen breaks out here too.”

“We don’t know that,” offered Dr. Kette.

“Yes, you do!” thundered Roam. “The women know. We have been here eleven months, and there are twenty-seven women among us. Not one pregnancy. The women know we have no reason to celebrate.”

Martin glanced again at the children. Robyn sat near the door. She held a crumpled drawing. A part of it showed through, a Christmas tree with ornaments and lights. As the argument grew, she twisted the paper tight. Her eyes were red, but she never cried. She looked lost.

In the end, they voted for no official celebration.

Later, while in his zero-G work station, Martin adjusted the magnetic fields holding the ionized gasses in place. The biologists suggested the animals might feel more at home if the moon waxed and waned distinctly. He adjusted the monthly cycle according to their numbers.

When finished, he contemplated the length of the Ark. In the middle, the sun glared, intolerably bright, nearly a third of its daily distance across the sky. Around it, trees pointed toward the axis; cliffs, hills, bluffs, stretches of meadow, streams (water pumped from the lakes at their bottoms to springs at their tops) surrounded the light. An unbroken landscape, a whole one—no horizon separating any one part from another. He found this vision comforting, a perfect visual metaphor for life’s unity, and he couldn’t feel Dr. Roam’s despair, or any of the others. Thinking of the children, Martin wrote invitations to a Christmas party at sunset, Christmas Eve. He set the place, the central-Ark observation area, then sent them. He turned back to his equipment. There was work to be done; he had a party to prepare.

Martin arrived early, an hour before sunset. He took a tube transport that traveled on the Ark’s outside. An elevator carried him and the supplies to a flat, sandy clearing overlooking a small cirque. At the hollow’s bottom a lake reflected darkly. A startled mountain goat scrambled from the water’s edge, tumbling small rocks as it leaped to the top. Most splashed through thin ice into the lake, and the goat disappeared into a boulder field.

He’d pressed the kitchen to make candy canes, and hung them from leafless bushes surrounding the clearing. As he hung the last one, the early guests stepped out of the elevator.

Four-year-old Elise, the youngest child aboard, found the first candy. She held the cane out for everyone to see, and soon the other children busied themselves finding more of the sweets, even the Nyuen twins who were thirteen. Talk was muted. Almost mournful. Martin remembered Dr. Roam’s pronouncement, “We have no reason to celebrate.” The adults clustered around the radiant heaters, warming their hands. Robyn solemnly poked through brittle branches, looking for the last of the candy.

Martin crouched beside her. “Where’s your mom?”

Robyn tucked a cane into her shirt pocket. She looked down, scuffing dirt with the toe of her shoe. “She went to see the wolves. She’s been gone all day. I told her it was Christmas Eve, but she had to work.”

“Ah, that’s too bad.” Martin gave her another candy cane from the extras he kept in a pouch. She added it to her collection.

“Thank you. I’ll save them until later.”

“There’s hot chocolate in the thermoses,” he said.

Robyn sighed and headed for the crowd. Now that the candy had been found, all stood near the heaters.

Hilliert, an older biologist, called his son, Brad. “We really have to go, Martin. This was nice of you, but I don’t think we’re in the spirit.” Other scientists nodded their heads. “It’s cold, and we ought to get the kids home.”

Martin glanced at the sun. It had reached the western wall and begun its dimming cycle. Chill stung his cheeks. “I have a surprise, but we have to wait a few minutes. There’s a thermos with hot chocolate that’s mostly rum in my bag over there, if you want to break that out.”

Hilliert raised his eyebrows and put his hand on his son’s head. “We’ll stay a bit longer, Brad. Maybe we could sing a carol.”

Gradually the sun faded out. Long shadows became less and less distinct, and soon the only light came from the heaters glowing orange in the clearing’s middle. Martin stood behind the circle of parents and children, hands thrust deep into his pockets. Robyn tucked her hands into her armpits and didn’t join the singing. They finished two verses of “Good King Wenceslas” before someone said, “It’s pretty darned dark out here, Martin. Where’s the moon?”

He checked his wrist monitor. A counter clicked to zero. To the east, a point of red light appeared. “What is that?” the same voice asked.

Martin turned. At the west end, a green light flickered on. The scientists and their children turned from the heaters and looked up. The first two lights floated quickly to the center of the sky to stop a few degrees apart like a red and green star. Then new lights appeared at each end, a blue one to the east, and an orange to the west. Soon, a line of colored points reached from end to end, much smaller than the moon or sun, not nearly as bright. Martin barely made out his own hands in the diffuse light, and then, following the program he designed, they began to pulse individually from bright to dark and back again.

The elevator door opened, its white light silhouetting Dr. Kette as she stepped out. Robyn cried out, “Mom, look. Christmas lights!” The door closed, and only the colored lights illuminated the world.

A hand touched his leg. “Is that you, Martin?” Robyn said.

“Yes.”

“Mommy came. She came to your party.”

Vaguely Martin could make out Dr. Kette standing beside him; he mostly saw the colors in her eyes as she looked up.

“This is lovely, Martin.”

They stood for a long time. Behind them one of the kids said, “Let’s sing ‘Silent Night,” and they did; their voices filled the clearing.

“Did you see the wolves?” asked Martin.

“Yes,” said Dr. Kette. She held her daughter’s hand. Their breath steamed in the frigid air. “The mother whelped,” she said. “Four perfect pups. They were mutagen free.”

Martin couldn’t tell if she were crying.

In the darkness, in the sky beyond, he saw glitters like stars, and realized the icy ponds and streams on the roof of the world reflected the display. It was an effect he’d never seen. The moon didn’t reflect this way. In the day the sun revealed land and vegetation, but in this light, there were sparkles, red ones and green, blue and orange. Multicolored tinsel strings; long, glass blue lines shading into the orange of frozen creeks; red fog rising into green, rising into blue; green snowy meadows blushing red then yellow; orange mountain ridges transformed; star glisters blinking everywhere—a thousand stars over Bethlehem—shards of Christmas light, changing in the changing night.

The wolves were born whole.

He’d never seen the Ark so beautiful.




WORKING PUSHOUT


Our dream is your dream

    

—Burger Land advertisement






I don’t trust my dreams anymore; I don’t believe they’re mine. A busy lunch with customers lined up outside the door and me sliding my hip down the aluminum prep counter’s rounded edge, bagging burgers and fries, grabbing drinks and pushing them out, that’s real. I can trust a lunch rush but not these dreams. Not the stuff inside my head.

Lunch is over. Two o’clock to three-thirty. Orders will pick up after this until we’re into the dinner crowd. Of course, I’ll be home. That’s Howard Fisk’s shift. I’m sitting in back by the newly delivered produce talking to VJ. The green smell from hundreds of heads of freshly cut lettuce overpowers the old burger grease and detergent odors. He’s sipping coffee that he sweetened with half a dozen packs of sugar. I offered to pay for it. As always, he said, “Put it on the Visa,” pulled from his frayed overcoat a card that’s held together with masking tape, and put it on the table between us. I’m listening to the orders through my earphone in case they need me up front: “Ten Bigs down, please,” says someone. The reception is tinny; voices indistinguishable. “Four with cheese.” Someone else says, “Six cokes, two diet, one no ice.” A long pause. The dead air hisses quietly. Then, “Carter’s a hog.” I grimace. Seven employees have transmitters. Four of them come from Lincoln High where I taught history last year. I can’t tell who said it.

VJ says, “Voices in your brain, Carter?” He hunches his right shoulder up and rests his ear on it. A gray-streaked lock of hair hangs over his eyes.

“Always,” I say. He may be a bum, but I can tell him anything. What will it matter? He listens. Lots of times he asks questions, too. Always interesting ones. Nothing about how many sixteen ounce cups I’ll need for the next week, or how many gallons of fry oil. Most of the street people I give coffee to are good listeners.

I tell him about Howard Fisk, about how much I hate him. I tell him about the stuff inside my head.

VJ asked me about the dreams before I ever mentioned them. A month ago, right after they hired Howard, VJ said, “What’d you dream last night?” And that was kind of funny, because I never dream, but when he asked I remembered that I had dreamed that night. I’ve dreamed regularly since then, too.

In the dream I am sitting by the cases of lettuce, like I am now, doing preinventory, marking my sheet with a pencil, which Howard Fisk will erase before he writes his count in pen, and then I’ll signature each total in ink after I’ve confirmed his work. Triple check. I purposely miscount sometimes to find out if Howard actually does his job. Only, in the dream, I’m seeing myself rather than being myself. My hair is thinning on top. My shoulders are brutish, hands fat, fingers grossly squat, belly sagging onto my lap, white shirt greasy, black pants greasy, black shoes greasy. A funhouse mirror version of myself. A troll me. In real life I’m… husky, not like this vision.

I hit the dream me with the lyepit pole, a heavy steel rod with a hooked end we use to pull the broiler parts out of the lye each morning. My head wraps around the pole. No blood but lots of hamburger grease. I strike myself again and again, pounding myself into a flat, slickly shining blob.

I woke up, my T-shirt bunched under my armpits, my blankets tangled around my feet. I went into the bathroom and toweled the sweat off my chest and back. I put baby powder between my legs to keep them from sticking together.

I told VJ about the dream, and he said, “Tell me something mean about yourself.” I thought about it for a while, then said, “The nice thing about managing a Burger Land is I can fire sixteen-year-olds for being immature.”

I learned about sixteen-year-old immaturity in my brief teaching career. “You’ve got to learn from the past,” is what I said my first day in American History at Lincoln. I was wearing a suit that I’d bought just for teaching. Thirty-two sophomores sitting at their desks stared right through me. That was my best day at the school. At the end of the third week, someone had written my name under the hugely fat caricature of Boss Tweed on the bulletin board. The principal asked me to quit at the end of the year.

I fired my first employee the third day after I took the day manager’s job. Her name was Femi and her parents were Nigerian. She had burned a basket of fries.

“But, Mr. Carter, you told me to fill the napkins.” Her huge lower lip trembled. Her hair net pulled kinky hair tight away from her forehead. Her dark skin looked dusty to me. She would be a junior at Lincoln High in the fall. I’d seen this act before, the quivering voice, the sincerity, the dropping of the head. All high school students adopt it when they blow a responsibility.

“Food in the fryer comes first,” I said. We went back and forth for a couple of minutes, then she got belligerent. That’s step two in the immature person’s repertoire of tactics.

She shouted, “You tell me to do one thing and I’m doing another. Am I supposed to be telepathic?”

Some of the lunch crew on break were watching us. Howard Fisk had come in to pick up his paycheck. He held his little woman, hands up to his mouth, and looked pained. There’s got to be respect. I fired her.

She said, “I hope you can’t sleep at night,” and flipped me off when she stomped out the back door.

In the summer the day crew has thirty to thirty-five teenagers working. I fired one every four or five days. At the time, nights were great.

VJ says, “How is your wife?” His face is dirty, but the coffee has cleaned his top lip, which is red and chapped. I tell him.

Tillie and I don’t make love. She shares an apartment with a nurse, and I see her twice a month when she picks up her check at the end of my shift. I’ll see her tonight. I’m tense, thinking about seeing her. I check my fly all the time, as if I’m afraid she’ll come in and I’ll be exposed. Usually she comes through the employee door, doesn’t smile, talks in monosyllables, wears nice clothes I didn’t buy her. She’s lost weight since we separated.

Last time we talked I said, “How are you doing, Tillie?”

“Fine.”

“Car running okay?”

“Yes.”

“I was thinking of taking some graduate courses at the university. Maybe something towards an M.B.A.”

“Good for you.”

“Do you want a burger?”

“No. Thanks.”

She went out through the dining room, talked to Howard Fisk, who was eating his dinner before the night crew came in. She always talks to Howard. I watched her through the one-way mirror in my office. She ate one of his onion rings. He didn’t look at her. Kept his head down. When she went out the front door, he smiled at her and half-waved. She smiled back. She hasn’t smiled at me for years.

VJ says, “I stay away from women.”

Despite the almost palpable odor of lettuce, and the underlying hints of lye, cooking meat, old grease, soaps, Styrofoam, cardboard and plastics, VJ smells like an alley, a reminder of trashcans, a wetgutter. I think the women stay away from him.

“I’ll be back in a minute,” I say, and I go up front to see how they are doing.

The secret to running a fast food franchise is knowing what the customer wants before he can think to ask you for it. Most of the time I work pushout. The rush adrenalizes me. People lined up out the door. Green-screened television monitors filled with orders. Voices whispering in my earphone. My hands flying. Burgers out from under the heat lamps and into the bags (mayonnaise makes the waxy paper wrappings slick). Fries fresh from the vats hot enough to blister if I held them that long. Drinks all in order, all in a row.

I’ll say something like, “That’s two quarter pound Burger Land burgers, three small fries, a small coke, a small lemonade and a coffee.” I’ll place the two bags on the counter. The order might have flickered onto the monitor eleven seconds ago. I’ve timed myself. During the rush I average fourteen seconds an order.

I’ll say, “Would you like some ketchup with those fries?” I throw a package in. Some people want the condiments, some don’t. I’ve got a feel for condiments. Hardly anyone asks me for something before I ask them if they want it. The owner, Mr. White, told me that I’d have to read their minds if I was going to be good. In the rush, when I’m on automatic and my analytical side has shut down, I can. I’m good at clearing my mind.

I walk behind Ashmid, a scrawny seventeen-year-old with hairy arms. He’s dropping raw, red patties onto the broiler belt.

“Broil dem burgers, yeah, yeah,” he sings over and over under his breath.

If I say, “Go wash the tables, Ashmid,” he’ll say, “Yasuh, boss.”

“Tote that bale,” I say.

“Yasuh, boss.”

Janet Sims, staring absently into an empty fry bag, stands next to the shake machine.

“How’s the dining room?” I ask.

“Fine, sir.”

“Straw dispensers?”

“Filled, sir.”

A large mustard stain shaped like a breast discolors her uniform pant’s blue and white pinstripes.

“Go clean something,” I say.

“Yes, sir.”

For the moment the lobby and parking lot are empty. I send two of the boys out to sweep the sidewalks.

VJ says when I sit back down, “How tight’s the ship?”

“Tight. Lazy day.”

“So, tell me another dream.”

“I don’t want to,” I say. “Tell me one of yours.”

“I know what my dreams mean.”

“So do I.”

“No, you don’t.”

VJ is like this. He tells me I’m wrong, and I don’t get mad.

“Okay.” I remember another dream.

This one starts where I’m driving a bus in the fog and I see myself walking down a street, Orchard Avenue. The steering wheel is huge and horizontal. I lean over it and crank hard to steer up the hard bump of the sidewalk. The bus snaps off parking meters; slams aside parked cars. The me on the sidewalk looks up, turns, lumbers away, thighs too fat to run. Dead end. The me on the sidewalk turns, covers his face. I squash me into a blue dumpster. Big splash of hamburger grease on the windshield, just my hands visible at the bottom of the glass, like five-tentacled octopi.

I start laughing, and then someone touches my shoulder. It’s Tillie. She takes my hand and leads me down the aisle; the sun breaks through the fog and slants through the windows. Dust motes circle slowly. She stops at a huge bench seat, schoolbus green vinyl, sits down, lays back, pulls her skirt up. Her pubic hair is black, straight and vast, like a porcupine has curled up between her legs. But Tillie’s real hair is tightly curled and thin. I told her once she ought to just shave, for all there is.

She says, “Climb on the bus, sailor.”

VJ says, “Climb on the bus?”

“Yeah.”

“Then what else happens?”

“That’s it. That’s the end of the dream.”

“And that’s what’s bothering you?” He tilts his head off his right shoulder, moves in a complicated convulsion that switches his head tilt from the right to the left shoulder, a mirror image of his former position.

“Yeah. Sort of.” I can’t tell him about the other stuff that’s started happening when I’m awake. I mean, most people have dreams, but this other stuff seems crazy. Most people believe street people like VJ are insane, because they dress weird or they’re dirty or they mumble to themselves, but I’ve found them to be just like anybody else. I don’t want him thinking I’ve flipped.

He starts humming the Burger Land theme song. “You deserve a dream today,” he sings. I pour him some more coffee. A wind blows the back door shut with a loud squeak and rain splatters against the roof. “How come you don’t have Burger Land dreams?”

That’s scary that he would ask that, because Burger Land is part of what I can’t tell him about. So I say, “You don’t dream what you do. You dream what you want.”

“Exactly.”

“You think I want to kill myself and make love to a woman who looks like my wife but isn’t anatomically correct?”

“Maybe. What do you want?”

I think about Howard Fisk.

Howard Fisk took the night managing job when Mr. White promoted me. The night job is really a split shift and I was glad to give it up. Howard Fisk comes in every morning at nine and inventories produce. Takes an hour. Then we have a meeting and I go over the last night’s receipts with him and he takes the money to the bank. Sometimes he has to exchange cash for change and he brings that back. At four he comes in, eats dinner and starts his shift at four-thirty. I don’t know what he does in the middle of the day.

“Why aren’t our dinners bigger, Howard?” I asked once.

“The kids work hard.” He wouldn’t look up at me.

“Lunch was huge yesterday. Twenty-two hundred bucks. Biggest of the five stores, but you brought in eight hundred for the rest of the day.”

He shrugged his shoulders and hung his head. He’s a little guy, thirty-five, my age. Single. Ex-Navy man. He’ll never be day manager though. Too wimpy. Afraid of everyone.

I tried to get him fired.

“Look at this, Mr. White.” I held up a chart with a night receipts graph that looked like a pyramid starting at the bottom when I took over the nightshift, peaking the week before I changed to days, and dropping off since Howard Fisk took over. “We’re losing money.”

He said, “You’re not losing a thing.” I shut up about Howard Fisk. Mr. White will figure it out eventually.

Above the door into the back room, just out of the customers’ sight, a sign says NO PERSONAL MUSIC PLAYERS IN THE PREP AREA. That’s my rule, but I know Howard lets the night crew use them anyway.

Howard Fisk is a doormat. He makes me queasy. He looks at me when I’m not paying attention, but I’ve never caught him at it.

I pushed him into a corner. He tried to stand up straight, but I kept bouncing my hands off his chest. I’ve got this problem with physical confrontations. I mean, I like them. So I go to a group counseling session once a week. It’s part of my separation agreement.

“Howard,” I said, “if you don’t enforce this rule, then what will the employees think?”

“I don’t know.” He tried to sidle away from me. I pushed him again. I must outweigh him by a hundred pounds.

“They’ll think I’m a fool, Howard. We don’t want that, do we?”

“No,” he said.

I wanted to hit him, I mean really belt him, over and over, but I backed off. “Good,” I said.

VJ’s waiting for me to answer.

“Oh, you know, the usual stuff: make a million dollars, get laid a lot, kill Howard Fisk,” I say.

“What does Howard Fisk want?” he says.

“Who cares?”

“What does he dream about?”

I don’t know how to answer that. He finishes his coffee.

VJ says, “I’ve got to go now. It’s almost four o’clock.” If he’s not at the shelter by nightfall, they won’t let him in. I fill a thermos with coffee for him. He fills his pockets with sugar and ketchup packets.

Howard comes in and orders dinner. I see him talking to Rideth at the register. Rather than saying anything to him, I inventory the walk-in freezer. Wisps of steam waterfall off the sides of the fifty pound boxes of fries. I’m hot, and the cool air feels good. In the semidark I start a daydream, which is what I wasn’t able to tell VJ about. My vision doubles, like a migraine, and then I hallucinate.

I’m sitting in the dining room and I can see my hands cradling a burger. I’m bringing it up to my mouth. My fingers are skinny, bony and small, like a child’s. I know that I’m really in the freezer, but I’m also eating a burger. The red checkered print on the Formica table top picks up the red in the molded plastic bench seats. In my hallucination the dining room is empty. I’m thinking about Burger Land’s latest television commercial. The camera pans the walls of a cluttered apartment kitchen where a middle-aged man works on a blueprint of a house, his house, on a tiny table. His pregnant wife tiptoes in behind him carrying a Burger Land takeout tray with two Styrofoam Big Burger boxes and two drinks on it. The camera cuts to the blueprint where the man is penciling in a word, “nursery,” on one of the rooms. The wife looks over his shoulder and sighs. She puts down the tray and they embrace. The focus softens and “Let our dream be your dream” scrolls on the screen.

In my hallucination I think, “People who can’t dream deserve this.” I look up from my burger and my tiny hands and into the rainstorm that is pelting the darkened parking lot. My face is reflected in the glass. It’s Howard Fisk’s face.

I’ve been dreaming Howard Fisk’s dreams.

I shake my head and fall backward against the wall of the freezer. My shirt sticks for a second, pulling out of my pants, as I slide down to sit on the woodslat floor. I toss my clipboard away from me. I shiver, then roll onto my hands and knees and retch loudly once. Nothing comes up. My cheek presses against the frosted wood. In my earphone someone says, “Two Big Cheeses, two large fries and an apple pie to go.” My elbow is pushed up against a cardboard box stiff enough that when I move away it crackles. My breath fogs the air each time I exhale. I imagine my body stiffening, so much meat.

I’m really cold. The employee door creaks open and I hear Tillie ask in the prep area, “Have you seen Carter?”

I push myself up, tuck my shirt in, check my fly. This stuff that’s inside my head, I’ve got to deal with it. It means something.

I’ll go into the dining room and have some onion rings with Howard. Tillie can find me there. Maybe the three of us can talk. I’m not very likable—I know that now—but that doesn’t mean I’m a bad person.




NOTES FROM THE FIELD


So much human language is untranslatable. After I’d scanned and tagged my latest subject, she talked non-stop.

She started by saying, “I don’t do this often. It’s my rule to get to know someone before we… you know… sleep together.” And she continued as she pulled up nylons, wiggled into a short-skirted black dress and adjusted her hair. My equipment recorded it, of course, for later analysis and synthesis with the rest of the field data. She told me about her sisters and how they were married, “Except Susan, who has been living with this realtor in Seattle for two years, so she’s practically engaged,” and then went on about her job while she reapplied makeup. When she went into the bathroom, I checked the tag’s status; the monitor showed it had already attached itself to the Fallopian tube, where it would stay, transmitting data for about six months until it broke down into undetectable biological components.

Upbeat, bright, until she was ready to go, she asked me what about half of them do. “Will I see you again?” Her face seemed poised, carefully blank.

I shrugged. A useful gesture, communicating messages in a wide range.

She took a deep breath, a shuddery one, and looked away, which often means the subject is on an emotional edge. I hadn’t seen it coming. I hardly ever do. Reading human facial expressions is my hobby, not part of my mission, but I don’t feel I’m very good at it. She looked around my apartment, at the art prints in frames, at the expensive stereo equipment, at the new furniture, which reinforced my masquerade as a young business executive, and said, “Don’t mind me. It’s all blather.”

I’ve discovered humans in the bars are often lonely, a little desperate. The sex is an amelioration.

Blather: In this context, probably meaning language that covers or replaces the message the sender would prefer to communicate. Although all human languages possess words used in this way, there is no Lasarént equivalent.

The last Lasarént abduction of a human for examination and tagging occurred in 1967 near San Antonio, Texas. The three other extrasolar races quit the practice before 1964. They attracted too much attention. Memory adjustments weren’t perfect. That’s the nature of technology, imperfection. So the plan to study humanity entered its second phase, infiltration. Still, abduction stories appeared in the tabloids. For a while there was considerable bickering among the four races about who was cheating, but it became evident that human behavior is often delusional.

My first field experience coincided with our last abduction. The human lived in Tremaine, an hour’s drive from San Antonio along a twisting, graveled road. We stalled his truck, anaesthetized him and moved him to an exploratory vehicle. Some tests require a lively nervous system, however, so he was brought near consciousness. He looked at us from the table, eyes half closed. “Jesus, Mary, son of a bitch. It’s the goddamned Rapture.”

I’ve been in the field ever since, over thirty years.

Rapture: In this context, probably meaning a religious experience of being transported to heaven. Some confusion here over his use of the article “the” instead of the more commonly expected, “a.” Other terms for this include “the final reward,” and “coming home.” See “euphemism.” Beyond that, the utterance resists translation.

For three weeks I’d been collecting information and tagging specimens in singles bars in the Old Town area of Sacramento when I ran into a Trosfrilla operative. My bioenhancements and cosmetic surgeries, some of them quite radical and painful, allowed me to pass as a male human. I had the more difficult task of studying females. Lasarént field operators disguised as females, using similar techniques in tagging males, reported as many as three or four specimens a night. One evening I attracted two females to my apartment at the same time, which nearly overloaded my scanning equipment, but other nights I only collected notes. In other countries, of course, we use practices appropriate for their cultures.

A converted riverboat, the Sleepy Jean Grill and Suds, permanently docked near the Port of Sacramento, was the next bar on my schedule. A place couldn’t be visited too often, or I might have to deal with a previous contact a second time. There is no scientific need to scan the subject twice once it has been tagged, but females I’d met previously often ruined my chances for a new encounter by talking until the bar closed. I parked in the lot, and crossed a gang-plank over the water to enter.

Inside, the bar stretched the length of the narrow room and was made of weathered barn planks, heavily varnished. Neon beer signs flashed behind Venetian blinds. No cover. A local hangout. Hard to get to if you didn’t know it was there. Grill behind the bar to the side, where a cook flipped burgers and fried potatoes. Lots of cooking odors, beer and a mossy undertone from the river. Red lights. A small dance floor flanked by large speakers at one end, a pair of pool tables at the other. Tables in between. In a larger singles bar I’d have better luck attracting someone, but I had plenty of data from those venues. Now I was more interested in atypical cases.

The lights caught my attention—they were nearly the hue of the spring time Lasarént sky—and the water smells reminded me of my birth den in the bank of the far Hydrash. Before the crowd arrived, I could feel the current flowing beneath the boat, rubbing the aged wood. As soon as I entered, I knew I would return. I took a table in the middle and asked the waiter for two place settings. It was one of several techniques to interest women, the empty chair. Some women can’t resist a single man, nicely dressed, aesthetically pleasing (we’d spent years perfecting attractive proportions in the lures—a fractionally small shift in eye placement, nose size or teeth arrangement can make a lure successful or a failure—my human face had been altered numerous times). She can’t resist if it’s obvious his date has not arrived.

The empty chair is a passive technique. It depends on the women coming to me, as do several other ruses such as reading a book, or taking notes. A tape recorder on the table will sometimes work, or a camera. What doesn’t work is looking unoccupied. A man who clearly just waits is shunned. Scanning the bar doesn’t work either. A man looking for a woman never finds her. There are active techniques too. Many of them. Almost all involve some pretense for conversation, not just, “Nice weather we’re having, don’t you think?” but anything that asks the woman to contribute something of her own. Even something as simple as, “Great jacket. Where’d you get it?” can be a beginning. After that, the evening scripts itself around drinks, dancing, more conversation until it’s obvious she is willing to come to my apartment. Often there needs to be an excuse to go, either to see the art prints, or to admire the view from the balcony, or to listen to music. Rarely will either of us be straight-forward: “Let’s go somewhere private for sex.” Humans are interesting in this behavior. Important matters to them aren’t discussed directly.

I’ve been among the humans for years, “sleeping together” numerous times. Never have I discussed my matters of importance. We have no middle ground.

“Sleeping together” does not involve sleeping. It is sex, often times on a bed (which is used for sleeping too!) but one female told me we’d “slept together” when we didn’t make it past the clothes closet. Fortunately the scanning equipment covers the entire area equally well.

I was part way through a salmon steak, which I’d developed a taste for, when the woman sat at my table.

“I hate to eat alone, do you mind?” she said. Blonde hair cut short. Dark eyes, hard to see the color in this light. According to human conceptions of physical beauty, I guessed that she didn’t have to eat alone often. She was almost six feet tall, my height. Slim. Plain, blue shirt worn loose. White pants. White boots tucked under the pant’s legs. Not standard dress for a singles place, but the Sleepy Jean wasn’t typical, as I said. Two motorcycle types at the bar watched her for a moment before turning back to their drinks.

“Not at all,” I said. “Have you ordered?”

She brushed hair off her forehead. “Don’t mind if I do.”

Normally, meeting a woman is not this easy. Even though the bars exist for social interactions, humans are wary at first. They don’t trust each other. It seemed clear to me, though, that this one was bound for my apartment, so I field-scanned her. A tiny unit on my wristwatch would tell me if she’d been tagged before and give me an overview of her suitability for our studies.

She was Trosfrillan, one of the other extrasolars, which explained her height. How they got a nine-foot tall, six limbed creature into this package amazed me. My modifications, painful as they were, were not as drastic.

“Damn!” she said, looking at her own watch.

We didn’t speak for a while. The Trosfrilla study humans in much the same manner as we do. They are interested in travel patterns. Mating rituals. Work/recreation ratios. Sleep/wake cycles. Biochemistry. The normal field data for any species. Past difficulties prevent us from sharing our findings, though there is now some effort to consolidate the work. Our races evolved on different planets in the same system. There had been wars in our past. We were competitors.

I looked around the bar again. The motorcycle guys hunched over their beers. A couple shot pool at a table at the bar’s far end. Beneath me, the floor moved subtly, responding to the river’s flow.

“My name’s Arlyss,” I said. My Lasarént name would damage a human throat.

“Trudy,” she said. “Have you been down long?”

“Off and on for thirty-some years. I haven’t been off-world for eleven years now.”

The waiter came by and took her order. I ate more salmon. The mimicked human gestures came almost naturally to me, often times revealing my emotions in ways I would never display when in my Lasarént body. I found myself smiling. It had been a long time since I had talked to someone without pretending. “Yourself?” I said, when the waiter left.

“Only five. I’d been doing Seleneological surveys when this opportunity came up. It was a change.” She shifted in her seat. “I’m uncomfortable in this form.”

I nodded. Gravity was wrong. Not all that different, only 1.2 heavier, but it was wrong. A different molten core beneath me. A different wash of magnetic influences. The stars at night, wrong.

She didn’t wait for her meal. “I have to go. Quotas.”

I felt a unfamiliar urge within me as she rose. A few more people had entered the bar, taking other tables, all humans who could never know who I was. Their faces moved strangely, in their human way: too many horizontal lines, when they closed their mouths or eyes, the eyebrows, the hair line, all oddly horizontal. It frightened me to recognize their feelings in their faces—that I couldn’t really remember what a Lasarént face looked like. I wanted her to stay. She wasn’t Lasarént, but we shared a sun. “Why did you come here?” I said. The bar was small. Even when it was full, it would be as unlikely a place for her work as it was for mine.

She pushed her chair under the table. I noticed her fingers. Their sculpting was perfect, nails exactly human-like. The Trosfrilla have six fingers on their manipulating hands. She lost part of herself for this transition too. “The river reminded me of home.” She floated her hand away and indicated the whole bar. “The light—did you notice?—it’s like Trosfrilla.”

“I saw,” I said, but she was already striding away. The bikers watched her again.

Clearly I made her uneasy. If she wanted to scan and tag a human, she would be as successful here as she would be anywhere else. It wasn’t the quota that drove her away. It was me. I wondered about Trosfrillan morality. Did she consider her work embarrassing? Was this a perversion in her eyes?

Bestiality: Sexual relations with an animal. Humans consider this to be of the lowest sort of behavior. The background for this revulsion is untranslatable. Is there a Trosfrillan equivalent?

As it turned out, I made a contact that night, a woman playing pool by herself. I put quarters on the rail, shot eight-ball with her until closing.

Pool is an elegant game, maybe one of the best of the human recreations. I get lost in the velocities and angles, the cue in my hand, the felt’s smooth plain, the ball’s muted click. We played evenly. She set up for a shot then stood back each time, as if she were shooting it twice. Called her bumpers. A rhythmic pattern she never varied. She clicked her tongue appreciatively when I made a good shot. After a while, I got the impression she didn’t care about the score. She watched the rolling ball like I did, as a physics demonstration. Something beyond personality. Humans startle me sometimes with their depth, and I wished I could talk to her about myself. Last call for drinks surprised me.

We left together, and she said, “Where’s your car?” I’d scanned her earlier. Twenty-seven years old. She showed evidence of having borne children. Impossible to tell more until she was at the apartment, where the equipment was better.

She didn’t talk as we drove away, but she looked out the window. Her unsmiling reflection flickered in the streetlights. Her breathing was even, hands still in her lap. “You have protection?” she said when we pulled into the parking lot.

I nodded. Of course it was designed not to interfere with my measurements or the placing of the tag. Human diseases didn’t threaten me, and I sterilized myself between encounters to not spread contagions. I’m the definition of “safe sex.”

Later that night I drove her back to the Sleepy Jean. After she shut the car door, she leaned in the window. “My name’s Margaret.”

“Sorry,” I said. “I’m Arlyss. I forgot to ask.”

“I thought you should know.”

I stayed in the parking lot, listening to the river. It started to rain. Big drops slapped against the windshield and splattered on the upholstery. A stream of muddy water crossed the parking lot to empty into the river between the anchored boat and the shore. The lights had been turned off, but the beer signs still glowed, glinting redly in the rain pools. I hadn’t thought of Lasarént for years, not like this.

I once read a bumper sticker on a truck parked outside a Chicago dance club: “Save time: go ugly early.” No translation available.

The next night, at Shatterday’s, a huge singles lounge in north Sacramento, I saw Trudy again. She was on the crowded dance floor, as far as I could tell, by herself. Now that I knew she was Trosfrillan, I could see it in her movements. Their backs have twinned vertebrae. Even in her near perfect human form, she danced distinctly. People gave her room. More than a few watched her, men and women.

I held my beer tightly, waiting for it to warm to a drinkable temperature. Even though I had been in the bar for an hour, I’d made no attempt to hook up with anyone. I contemplated the music, which is not artistic to my ear, but I find it beautiful that they have music. It tells me perhaps we will get along when this race breaks free from its planet, when we reveal ourselves to them. There has to be something worthwhile in a species that devotes so much time to music, and invented pool. And they dance, of course, which speaks well for them, even when it’s clear that much of the dance I see is variations on mating rituals. All posturing and invitations.

Trudy’s dance had none of that in it. Pure movement for the love of movement. The Trosfrilla have hierarchies of dance, achievement levels that take years to master, as do the Lasarént. In the mythology of encounters between our two races, there is a story of a war settled by a long dance. They danced the peace in, goes the tale.

“Do you want to dance?” said the woman. Short, a bit plump by human standards. I checked my watch. Young. Twenty-one. Untagged. Her friends sat at a table a few yards from mine, hiding their giggles. I don’t believe they thought she would have the courage to ask me. She danced well, for a human. At least she moved energetically. The song ended, and we waited for the next. She kept her hand on mine to keep from losing me in the crowd. We danced again. I made frequent eye contact. Responded to her changes in posture. Human dance: postures and invitation. I read her. She read me. Others jostled us. The music pounded in its numbingly unchanging beat. As always, I felt disconnected. I didn’t know her. She would never know me. No point of synchronicity in our lives. I could imagine her in my apartment in an hour or two, trying to close the distance. For me, what happened in the apartment was clinical.

What a fruitless pursuit on her part, even if I was human. I’d seen the same kind of face before. Sad, under the laughter. What would be the best she could hope for? That I wouldn’t leave her at the end of the evening? That I wouldn’t be in another bar on another night dancing with someone else? And then what would she have? Humans don’t meet in the mind as do the Lasarént. She would never press her back into the muddy wall of a den on the banks of the Hydrash, side by side with the family line. She’d never know ecstasy as the fleshy tendrils grew between us, from back to back, burrowed in, transferred genes and nutrients and emotion. She would never touch minds with her den mates in orgiastic communion all winter long.

I almost walked away from her. But a hand pressed against my thigh, and a voice whispered in my ear, “How do you handle the loneliness?” I turned. It was Trudy, already dancing away into the crowd.

What loneliness? I thought. I am a scientist on a mission. My work is my companion. We danced more. I bought the plump woman drinks.

At the apartment, she clung to me after I’d tagged her. “I was afraid I was too ugly for you,” she said.

I told her truthfully, “You are as beautiful as any woman I’ve seen.”

“You wouldn’t kid a kidder?” she said, and tears wet my chest when she pressed her face there.

“You wouldn’t kid a kidder”: To lie to someone who lies. This is one of many funny/sad utterances humans use, like “He has a face only a mother could love,” and “She’s built for comfort, not for speed.” Emotionally untranslatable.

The next night I sat in Bullsnappers until closing. Twice women asked me to dance. I declined. Sitting back, I watched the bar’s rhythm. Men and women in groups, leaning over tables, lined up at the bar, standing besides one another at the edge of the dance floor, mostly not talking, but together. Loud music. Too loud for conversation, but sometimes someone would touch another’s arm, and they’d push their heads together. She’d shout something. He would nod.

People got up, danced, sat down. Patterns emerged of touch and laugh and movement. Strobes flashed in the ceiling, and I watched the dance floor. Legs rearranging. Pelvic rotations. The sinuous flow of a skirt’s edge around a twirling woman. Bass beat, down deep, bouncing in my chest. No pause between songs, and the pattern started again. Hands on backs, shifting. Thighs pressed against thighs under tables. A kiss on a cheek. A bathroom door opened, and harsh light silhouetted the figure coming out.

It was all too loud, chaotic, and… alien. I couldn’t integrate here. Hadn’t integrated for so long I wasn’t sure I could. Nothing felt right. I left cash on the table and pushed my way to the exit. Faces blurred. Strange faces loud with horizontal lines and teeth and darting eyes, watching each other, watching me, and knowing nothing.

Outside, I breathed raggedly. Barely made it to my car. At the apartment, hands shaking, I ran a diagnostic. Maybe one of the implants was breaking down. Maybe, after all this time, my Lasarént immune system was rejecting the grafts, or it could be an acquired allergy. I had too many symptoms, but the equipment reported nothing wrong. Everything normal. For the first time in my field experience, I sedated myself and remained unconscious for several days.

On a Wednesday night, I returned to the Sleepy Jean. Same red lights. Same soothing murmur under the boat. No one in the bar besides the bartender, a cook and myself. I took notes idly about peanut shells on the floor, and how they cracked underfoot, about lingering odors beneath the obvious ones: perfumes, sweat, detergents, petrochemicals. The chair’s surface was cool and smooth, and I realized for the first time that it was an imitation of leather.

Around the room, numerous fakes and imitations. On the walls, old movie posters, but, on close inspection, not the originals. Baseball mitts hanging from the ceiling, just like ones I’d seen in several other bars to provide “atmosphere,” along with old road signs, car license plates, a pair of snow shoes, a boat oar, a stuffed peccary, several fishing poles: all pretending to be random, as if the bar grew to be this way instead of being designed. The beer mugs done in an old-fashioned style. The bartender dressed as a riverboat captain. Fakes. I scribbled into my notebook. So much of the integral human experience involved fakery, which was no different from what happened between them. For years I’d watched them come into bars, pretending to be at ease or happy or interested or interesting, and it all covered something else. Like their language.

I put my notebook down and shut my eyes. If I ignored the glassy clink behind the bar, shut out the alien cooking smells and odd gravity; if I concentrated on the river’s swishy passage under the boat and the dim red light through my eyelids, I could almost imagine faraway Lasarént. What season was it there? Would the rivers be running high now on their winding flow to the shallow seas? Would the hills be oozy and wet under the reddish sun? I licked my lips, tasted the river’s moisture on my tongue. Rested my head on the chair’s back to feel the moving water better.

I stayed that way for a long time.

Footsteps thudded on the floor. I felt them, and I scrinched my eyes tighter, trying not to break the feeling, but a chair scraped back, and someone joined me at my table. The problem with the vacant chair is it invites company. I thought about sending the person away. Another specimen for the database didn’t seem that important right now. What would be the use of one more tagged woman, moving through her life, tracked by invisible Lasarént field scientists? What would be the good of me committing one more act of human fakery?

It was Trudy.

“I expected to find you here,” she said.

I touched her hand. “That’s good work.”

She held it up to herself, fingers straight. “They hurt all the time, you know.”

I didn’t, but I said I did.

The bartender asked her if she wanted something, and she ordered a beer. When he turned away, she said, “Enzyme treatments make it palatable—even my digestive system was changed—but they drink it too cold.”

“Mine too. When I started, all the food was shunted to a storage stomach. I emptied it after meals, but they decided that was too cumbersome—shipping food to me twice a month—so I have earth-analog bacteria implants and a processor that converts it for me.”

“Ouch,” she said. “All that biologically?”

“Most. I’d attract a lot of attention in an Earth hospital if they X-rayed my insides, though.”

She laughed. I admired the perfection of her guise. No evidence of vestigial scales. The missing limbs. The loss of height. The loss of eye stalks. Trosfrilla biotechs must be true artists.

The door opened and a dozen men and women poured into the bar. A coed softball team, wearing black and yellow T-shirts, talking excitedly.

I didn’t want her to go again. The players settled around two tables, calling for beer and pretzels. One of them plugged money into a juke box, and the Sleepy Jean suddenly became noisy and too crowded.

“Can we go someplace quiet?” I asked.

She nodded. What thoughts were going through her Trosfrilla brain? We were no longer enemies, technically, but she could learn nothing about Earth people from me. I could learn nothing from her. Our conversation made no scientific sense. We’d gain nothing from it. She was not a human woman. I could take no readings or plant a tag. Still, I wanted to stay with her.

She followed me in her car to my apartment. I turned the equipment off before she entered. No point in letting my superiors know I’d entertained a Trofrillan operative.

I said, “Can I get you something to drink?”

Trudy moved into my apartment unlike anyone who’d entered before. She dropped the human role; her feet slid across the carpet, more like her own gait, and her hands went to her jaw line that she rubbed hard. She said, “Water is fine, if it’s warm.” The heels of her hands ground into the side of her face. “It hurts all the time, here. I’ll be glad to go home.”

I poured the water and one for myself. Through the door I could see her examining my things. She pushed aside an art print to study the thin plate of scanning equipment behind.

“What’s your range?” she called.

“About fifty feet.”

She grunted and let the print swing back into place.

“Do you have any music?” she said. “Real music?”

I had several CD’s of recordings I’d made from Lasarént. The stereo couldn’t do the full tonal range justice, but it captured the mutating harmonics and asynchronous rhythms well. We sat beside each other on the couch. Through my picture window the sun set, a red sunset, and I smiled at that. Trudy stayed motionless, her fingers curled on her thighs, her wrists bent slightly, like a Preying Mantis. I smelled nothing Trosfrillan on her, only shampoo and perfume.

Around us the human city teemed with its activities. In the building, doors slammed—I felt their distant echoes—feet pattered down the hallways. Outside, traffic pushed past, all individually guided, most cars holding only one person. Busy. Horns and engine noise beat against the glass. A siren whining. But in my apartment, the red sun bathed everything warmly, and the music currents swept by, gentle and chaotic, like the river beneath the Sleepy Jean, like the far Hydrash. My scanning equipment was off. My position was no longer clinical. I wasn’t collecting.

Trudy rubbed her face again. Underneath the mock skin (Beautifully engineered! Only a well equipped lab that knew what to look for would be able to detect its extraterrestrial origin), I guessed her reshaped skull ached along its alien lines. She grimaced, a very human gesture of pain.

“Here, let me,” I said. In the kitchen, I filled a pan with warm water and found a washcloth. She watched me soak the cloth, then press out the excess moisture.

“I don’t think we should,” she said. Her hand rested on my forearm. “Thank you for the thought, though.”

Still, she didn’t resist when I placed the cloth against her cheek, let the warmth rest there for a moment, and then pushed my thumbs gently into the muscles. Her dark eyes locked on my own. When I went back to the bowl to reheat the cloth, she sighed and shut her eyes. I straddled her on the couch so I could massage both sides of her face equally. She moved her head against the pressure, so I could tell where she wanted it. Gradually, the apartment darkened, and the red sunset behind me went from vermillion to purple to sable. My thumbs kneaded her cheek bones, pushed into the ridge of her jawbone, circled under her ears—the skin caressed the covered bones, a whole tiny landscape of knobs and valleys and smooth plains, over and over.

She said, “Do you miss winter on Lasarént?”

My back ached with memory’s loss. The den filled and dark and close. The hormonal changes engendered in the moist soil and shared air, and the timeless eruption of tendrils in my back, burrowing through the mud, finding other tendrils, growing and intertwining until we joined, all of us, in one organism; one birthing, breathing, thinking organism that waited out the winter in warmth and communion and unity. The integration.

I couldn’t say anything, but swallowed the human sob in my throat while my thumbs orbited endlessly on her face.

Her hands went to my shirt, unbuttoning. In the darkness I saw her eyes glinting, staring again at me. I massaged the skull above the ears; her hair tickled my wrists. She held my ribs and pulled me closer, her breath hot on my chest, then she reached around and put her hands on my back.

“Here?” she said, her voice mellow against the music.

“Higher,” I said, and moved down so she could reach.

The Trosfrilla know our anatomy; they know us. One can’t go to war for generations without learning of the enemy, and she knew. She knew. Her fingers traveled up and down beside my back bone, digging until she found the buried tendril-pods, chemically suppressed, but still there, sensitive to stimulation, and she rubbed them gently.

When the music ended, I fell away, exhausted.

We breathed deeply in the now silent room, city lights glittering beyond the window, the traffic slowed to its night time murmur.

“Thank you,” she said.

“Does it hurt as bad?” I touched the side of her face.

She didn’t look at me. “Not as bad. And you?”

Of course there had been incomplete satisfaction in what she’d done, not like a full nesting, but she knew the tendril-pods were there. She’d touched them and reminded them they were alive.

“That felt good,” I said. “Thanks.”

Trudy rose from the couch, and I knew she was leaving.

She got to the door before I said, “Will I see you again?”

By the dim city light, she paused, her back to me—things remained that way for many heart beats—then she shrugged.

“Why?” she said.

I tried not to weep, my alien form overwhelming me with reflexive emotion, and I suddenly understood something human.

“Don’t mind me,” I said. “It’s all blather.”




CLASSROOM OF THE LIVING DEAD


They came for me on a Monday morning when I was too exhausted to hear the back door caving in. Only when their hands were on me did I realize that all was lost, but the dead didn’t consume me. They dragged me out of the house, shambled the three blocks to the school, holding me tight in their rotted hands, shuffling in that loose-limbed, broken way that they had, until they’d pulled me up the stairs, through the front doors with their glass knocked out, down the hall strewn with books and abandoned backpacks, until we came to my room.

Here, too, windows were broken, and the Venetian blinds hung askew. Morning sun slanted through the uneven slats. They pushed me toward my podium. I clung to the top, sick with fear. When would they kill me? Would I become like them?

They stumbled against the desks, former students, all of them: Daniel, who used to play his guitar at lunch; Lisa, with her pierced lip and blue-dyed hair; Landon, who read manga and drew big-breasted girls in the back of his notebooks, all my students. They bumped into the chairs, moaning low in their throats, until they were sitting, a terrible parody of the class they once had been.

What did they want, with their white-washed eyes and bruised faces? They looked at me, blank-faced, but ravenous, expectant, somehow. Hands gripped the sides of their desks. A breeze stirred a loose paper on the windowsill.

Finally, Joselyn, a girl who used to look like she ran a brush through her long, brunette hair a thousand strokes before she came to class, raised her hand, her hair a knotted mess, now, her blouse, torn and stained. She raised her hand and waited.

“Yes, Joselyn,” I squeaked.

She opened her mouth, and for a while nothing came except a strangled gasping, until she forced the word: “Braaaiiins.” Her hand dropped with a thud. “Braaaiiins.”

“That’s what you want?”

She nodded. They all nodded.

Was this what remained, after they died, after they reanimated? A desire to continue, to be a little bit of what they once were? Was it all habit? Would the athletes head to the gym after school to make layups? Would the marching band tramp across the field, their tuneless instruments dead in their grips?

Joselyn said, “Braaaiiins,” a third time.

I found a marker in the desk. What could be more surreal, but who was I after all? The world had ended. The apocalypse had arrived. Still, I was who I was. They were what they had become.

I turned to the board. “Today, I will show you how to diagram sentences.” I wrote on the white surface. I drew lines and made connections and spoke the arcane language of grammar. When I faced the class again, they were silent and attentive.

“Braaaiiins,” someone in the back groaned.

By the time the sun had traveled to the horizon, I’d filled the board and erased it a dozen times. It didn’t matter what I talked about. They didn’t answer questions. They didn’t move.

But they let me live.

Tomorrow I think I’ll teach literature. Some Dickenson, some Poe. Tomorrow I’ll teach to the dead and for the moment pretend that the world will go on.

Tomorrow they won’t have to drag me to school.




SAVANAH IS SIX


For as long as Poul could remember, he’d spent the summer at the lake where his brother drowned.

This year, as they climbed in the van, Leesa said cryptically, “Savannah is six.”

Poul held his hand on the ignition key but didn’t turn it. “I know.”

Each year since Savannah was born, it got harder to come out. The nightmares started earlier, grew more vivid, woke him with a scream choked down, a huge hurting lump he swallowed without voicing. Poul took longer to pack the van; he delayed the day he left, and when he finally started, he drove below the speed limit.

They pulled into the long, sloping driveway down to the cottage just after noon. Leesa had slept the last hour, and Savannah colored in the back seat, surrounded by baggage and groceries. Her head was down, very serious, turning a white sky into a blue one. She always struck Poul as a somber child, for six, as if there was something sad in her life that returned to her occasionally. Not that she didn’t smile or didn’t act silly at times, but he’d catch her staring out the window in her bedroom before she’d go to bed, or her hand would rest on a favorite toy without picking it up, and she seemed lost. She was quick to tears if either parent scolded her, which happened seldom, but even a spilled drink at dinner filled her eyes, the tears brimming at the edge, ready to slip away.

Their cottage sat isolated by a spur of nature conservancy land on one side and on the other by a long, houseless, rocky stretch. He bought the place fourteen years earlier, the year after he married, from Dad, who didn’t use it anymore.

Only a couple of hours from Terre Haute, Tribay Lake attracted a slower paced population; county covenants kept the skiers off, so the surface remained calm when the wind was low. From the air it looked like a three-leafed clover, with several miles of shoreline. An angler in a boat with a trolling motor could find plenty of isolated inlets covered with lily pads where the lunkers hung out.

By mid-June the water warmed to swimming temperature—inner tubes were stacked next to the boat house for a convenient float—and the nights cooled off for sleeping. Poul and Leesa took the front room overlooking the lake. In the first years they’d opened the big windows wide at night to listen to crickets. Lately, though, he went to bed alone while she worked crossword puzzles, or she retired early and was asleep by the time he got there.

Poul knew the lake by its smell and sounds—wet wood and fish and old barbeques, and waves lapping against the tires his dad had mounted on the pier to protect the boat, the late night birds trilling in the hills above the lake, and an echo of his mother’s voice, still ringing, when Neal didn’t come back. “Where’s your brother?” She’d asked, her eyes already wild. “Weren’t you watching Neal?” She called his name as she walked down the rocky shore looking for the younger son.

Savannah closed her book and said, “I’m going to catch a big fish this year. I’m going to see him in my raft first, then I’ll hook him. But I want to visit Johnny Jacobs and his kittens first.” Over Poul’s objection, Leesa had bought Savannah a clear bottomed raft, just big enough to hold a child, and it was all she’d talked about for weeks.

Poul said, “They won’t be kittens anymore, Speedy. That was last fall. They’ll be cats by now.” Gravel crunched under the wheels. Leesa didn’t move, her sweater still bunched between her head and the window.

Poul wondered if she only pretended to be asleep. It was a good way to not converse, and the lean against the window kept her as far away from him as possible. “We’re here, Leesa,” he said, touching her hand. She didn’t flinch, so maybe she actually had been sleeping.

Leesa rubbed her eyes, then pushed her short, black hair behind her ears. She’d started dying it last year even though Poul hadn’t noticed any gray. His hair had a couple of streaks now, but his barber told him it made him distinguished. At thirty-five, he thought “distinguished” was a good look.

“I’m going to walk down to Kettle Jack’s to see if he has fresh corn for the grill. I like grilled corn my first night at the lake,” Leesa said. Poul wondered if she was talking to him. She’d turned her face to the side, where the oak slipped past.

Poul pulled the car under the beat-up carport next to the cottage. Scrubby brush scraped against the bumper. Leesa opened the door and was gone before he could stop the engine. Savannah said, “I don’t like corn on the cob. Can we have hot dogs?”

“Sure, Speedy.” On an elm next to the cottage, a frayed rope dangled, its end fifteen feet from the ground. Summers and summers ago, there’d been a knot in the end and Neal hung on while Poul pushed him. “Harder, Poul!” he’d yell, and Poul gave another shove, sending the younger boy spinning. Poul looked at the rope. He didn’t remember when it had broken; it seemed like this was the first time he’d seen it in years. With the door open now, forest smells filled the car: the peculiar lakeside forest essence that was all moss and ferns and rotted logs half buried in loam, damp with Indiana summer dew. He and Neal had explored the woods from the cottage to the highway, a half-mile of deadfall and mysterious paths only the deer used. They hunted for walking sticks and giant beetles, or, with peanut butter jars in hand, trapped bulbous spiders for later examination.

Someone yelled in the distance, a child, and Poul jumped. He stood, his hands resting on the car’s roof. Between the cottage and the elms beside it, a slice of lake glimmered, and a hundred feet from shore, a group of children played on a permanently anchored oil drum and wood decked diving platform, whooping in delight.

“I’d like mustard on mine, and then I’ll go see the kittens,” said Savannah. She had her duffel bag over her shoulder—it dragged on the ground—and was already moving toward the back door.

“Sure, Speedy,” Poul said, although Savannah was already out of earshot. Poul arched, pushing his hands into his back. Sunlight cut through the leaves above in a million diamonds. He left the baggage in the car to walk to the shore. To his left, a mile away, partly around the lake’s curve, Kettle Jack’s long pier poked into the water. A dozen sailboats lay at anchor, their empty masts standing rock still in the windless day. Part way there, Leesa walked determinedly on the dirt path toward the lodge. Slender as the day they married. Long-legged. Satiny skin that bronzed after two days of sun. He remembered warm nights marvelling at the boundaries where the dark skin became white, how she murmured encouragement, laughing deep in her throat at shared joys.

Poul unpacked the van. Most of the beach toys went around front. He stuck the yellow raft on a high, open shelf in back of the cottage where rakes and old oars were stored. Maybe she’d forget they had it.

A screen slapped shut behind him. Savannah came down the steps. “I couldn’t find the hot dogs, and something smells bad in the kitchen. I’m going to count fish.”

Poul said, “Let’s go together. Life vest first.” He found one in a pile in the storage chest against the tiny boathouse. It had a solid heft that reassured him.

She pouted as he put it on. It smelled of a winter’s storage, a musty, gray odor that rose when he squeezed the belt around her. “Guess you aren’t the same size as last summer? Can’t have you grow up this fast. We’ll have to quit feeding you.”

Savannah didn’t smile. “Da-ad,” she said.

Minnows darted away when they stepped on the pier. To the left, weeds grew up from the mucky bottom, starting as a ten-foot wide algae belt next to the shore, and waving languidly below after that until the lake became too deep to see them. To the right, white sand began at a railroad tie border six feet from the cottage and reached into the water, a smooth, pale stretch for thirty feet. It cost two-hundred dollars every other season to have several dump truck loads of sand poured and spread to create the beach. A blunt torpedo silhouette a foot long moved toward deeper water. Probably a bass. Most perch were stockers in the lake, and a foot long blue gill would be a trophy. Only catfish and bass reached respectable size. Poul watched the fish gliding at the sand’s edge, perfectly poised between the artificial beach and the lake’s invisible depths. Once he’d stood at the same spot with Neal, fascinated by a three-foot long catfish, nosing its way beneath their feet. Through their reflections, through Neal’s glasses and wide brown eyes and sun-blond hair, and through Poul’s dark hair and blue eyes, they’d watched its broad, black back. Later they’d baited huge treble hooks with liver or soap, but the fish never returned. Dad had told them some catfish lived longer than men. That same catfish might still be prowling the lake’s bottom. Would it remember a summer of two small boys? Or was it now a ghost? Did old ones die to haunt the undersides of piers? Were there places even fish were afraid to go?

Poul shivered and glanced up. Savannah was on her stomach at the pier’s end. Her knees not touching wood, her weight precariously balanced. His throat seized up, and he walked quickly, almost a jog (although he didn’t want to scare her) to where she looked into the water. Poul put his hand on her back, holding her there.

Savannah’s hands were flat out, fingers splayed, nearly touching the surface. Without a breeze the lake was smooth as glass. “Look, Daddy. I’m underwater. Do you think she sees me?” Her reflection stared at her, its hands almost touching her own, the vision of a little girl six inches deep, looking up.

Poul’s tongue felt fat in his mouth, and it was all he could do to speak without a quiver in the voice. “Yes, dear. You’re lovely. Now let’s go in, and I’ll find the hot dogs.”

Savannah held his hand as they walked toward the cottage. The boards creaked underfoot. Through the wide gaps, water undulated in a slow, fractional swell. He shook his head. She’d never been in danger. Even if she’d fallen in, the life vest would have popped her to the surface, and he was right there. He wished he’d signed her up for swimming lessons during the winter. Poul kept his head down, watching his feet next to Savannah’s, her white sneakers matching his small steps. She gripped his little finger, and he smiled. After lunch, he’d break out the worms and bamboo poles (anything to avoid the clear-bottomed raft). He’d have to dig up the tall, skinny bobbers and show her again how to mount the bait on the hook.

He remembered fishing with Neal. Dad used an open bail casting reel, sending his lures to splash far away, but they had as much action tossing their bait a few feet from the boat. Poul would stare at the narrow, red and white bobber’s point, held upright by the worm’s weight and a couple of lead shot. The marker twitched, sending ripples away. It twitched again. “Something nibbling you, Poul,” said Neal, his own pole forgotten. “Yeah,” said Poul, concentrating on the bobber, which wasn’t moving now. He imagined a fish eyeing it below. Could be a bass, or maybe even a pike, like the stuffed one mounted on a board above the bar at Kettle Jacks, its long mouth open and full of teeth.

Savannah cried, “Help him, Daddy.”

“What?”

She pulled away, dropped to her knees and poked her head over the pier’s side, trying to look under. “Help him!”

“What, Savannah? What?” Poul knelt beside her; a splinter poked his shin. “Don’t fall in now!”

She sat up, her hair wet at the tips where it had dipped. “Where’d he go? Didn’t you see him? He was reaching up between the boards, Daddy. You almost stepped on him.”

The sun dimmed, and everything around them faded. Only Savannah was clear. Dimly children shrieked on the distant diving platform. When he spoke, it sounded to him as if they were in a bubble: his faint voice travelled no more than a yard away. “What did you see, Speedy? Who was reaching up?”

Her lip quivered. “The boy, Daddy. He was under the pier. I saw his fingers right there.” She pointed. “He was stuck under the pier, but when I looked, he’d gone away. Where do you think he went to, Daddy?”

Between the boards, the lake breathed gently, the surface smooth and untroubled. A crawdad crept along the muck. Poul watched it through the gap. “I don’t think there was anyone there, Speedy. Maybe your eyes played a trick on you.”

Legs crossed, her hands in her lap, Savannah studied the space between the boards for a moment. Slowly, she said, “My eyes don’t play tricks.” She paused. “But my brain might have imagined it.”

Poul released a long, slow lung full of air. He hadn’t known he’d been holding it. “If you’re hungry, sometimes your brain does funny things.” The sun brightened. Poul shivered, and he realized sweat soaked his shirt’s sides. “Let’s go in and have a hot dog.”

She nodded. He had to open the porch door for her; it was a high step up, and her fingers barely wrapped around the nob. Neal had been so proud his last summer when he could grip it.

Later, while Savannah put mustard on her meal, Poul said, “Why did you think it was a boy under the pier if all you saw was his fingers?” Savannah swallowed a bite.

“He had boy hands. Boy hands are different. I can tell.” She pushed the top back on the mustard.

In the evening, Poul walked to the end of the pier. A breeze had picked up, and on the lake, two sailboats glided side by side, their sails catching the sun’s last yellow rays. Now all the lake was black. If he jumped in here, the water would barely come to his chest—it would be just over a six-year-old’s head—but within a couple strides was a steep drop-off. The wind pushed waves toward him, a series of lines that slapped against the piles as they went by. He could feel the lake in his feet. Deep in his pockets, his hands clenched. Cottages on the far shore glowed in the last light, their windows like mica specks in carved miniatures. Behind them, forest-covered hills rose to the silence of the sky.

They’d found Neal ten feet from the pier’s end, his hands floating above his head, nearly on the surface, his feet firmly anchored on the bottom. Poul stood on shore, his fists jammed into his armpits, and watched them load him in the boat, wearing the face mask and snorkel, limp and small, his arms like delicate pipes, his six-year-old skin as smooth and pale as milk, black boots on his feet. They were Poul’s snow boots, buckled at the top and filled with sand.

Long after the sun set, and the boats disappeared and lights flickered on in cottages, music and voices drifted across the water, Poul came in to go to bed. On the porch, Savannah slept on the daybed. He checked the screens to make sure they were tight—mosquitoes were murder after dark—then locked the deadbolt, taking the key. Sometimes Savannah woke before he or Leesa did, and he didn’t want her wandering outside. In the kitchen, he shook as he poured a cup of tepid coffee. A humid breeze had sucked the heat out of him. The cup warmed his hands. Moths threw themselves against the windows, pattering to get in. Leaves hushed against themselves. Years ago he’d sat at this same table, sipping hot chocolate, laughing at Neal’s liquid moustache. That day they’d swam. The next they’d fish, and the summer at the lake stretched before them, a thousand holidays in a row.

Poul slipped up the stairs, keeping his weight on the side next to the wall so there would be no creaks. He left his clothes on a chair. Dock lights through the windows illuminated the room enough for him to get around without running into anything. A long lump on the bed, swaddled in shadows, was all he could see of Leesa. Except for his own breathing, there was no other noise, which meant she was awake. When she slept, she whistled lightly on each exhalation. From the beginning he’d found it charming, but never mentioned it, guessing it might be embarrassing. If he spoke now, he knew, she wouldn’t reply.

Three years ago when they were at the cottage, she began suffering headaches at bedtime, or sore throats, or stomach cramps, or pulled muscles, or dozens of other ailments. That same summer she went from sleeping in just a pair of boxer shorts to a full, flannel nightgown. She’d start complaining about her night time illness before lunch, and after a while, he figured they were all a charade. The last time they’d made love had been a year ago, in this bedroom. He remembered her back to him, and he pressed against her; he could feel her muscles through the flannel, her hip’s still delicate flare. She didn’t move away, so he pushed against her again. It had been months since the last time, and the day had been good. She hadn’t avoided him. She laughed at a joke. Maybe she’s thawing, he’d thought, so he watched her, and when she went to bed, he followed. No chance for her to be sleeping before he got there. But she undressed in the bathroom, came out with the collar buttoned tightly at her neck, didn’t look at him, and laid down with her back toward him. He didn’t move for a while. They’d been married too long for him not to recognize all the ways she was saying, “No.” Still, it had been months. He moved next to her. Outside, waves slapped upon the shore. The boat rattled in its chain.

It was the most loveless act he’d ever committed. Within moments, her whistling snore began.

That was the last time.

Why was she angry with him? Why had it gone so terribly bad? The closest they’d come to talking about it came that Christmas, after Savannah went outside to play in the snow, and he and Leesa sat wordlessly in the living room. He’d finally said, “What’s wrong?” The sweater he’d given her draped across her hands; she didn’t meet his eyes. “I don’t like this color any more.” Later he found the gift tossed in the back of the closet.

Whatever the source of the anger, it grew worse at the lake. The distance widened, and the nightmares came more often. He lifted the covers as little as possible and lay down. Leesa didn’t react. Poul looked at the ceiling. A light from a passing boat swept shadows from one side of the room to the other. Its small motor chugged faintly.

Leesa wasn’t whistling. He knew she heard the same motor. If her eyes were open, she’d see the same shadows. “Savannah scared herself on the dock today,” he said into the darkness, the sudden sound of his own voice startling him. Only the cooling cottage’s creaks and groans answered.

Hours later, still awake, he heard a noise downstairs. A muted rasp. He propped up on his elbows. Footsteps, then another scraping sound. A bump. Nothing for a long time. His eyes ached with attention, and saliva pooled in his mouth he didn’t dare swallow. After minutes, he slipped from the blankets and moved from the bed, crept down to the living room, every shadow hiding an intruder, the pulse in his ear like a throbbing announcement. He turned on a light, flicking the room into reality, then into the kitchen where moths clustered against the screens. On the porch, Savannah lay atop her covers, sleeping. Scratch marks showed where she’d pulled a chair to the door. She’d unhooked the chain, but the deadbolt defeated her. Poul tucked her in, then he grasped the door knob to check the lock again. Slick brass felt cool under his palm. Savannah had sleepwalked. When she was three, she’d done it for a few months, but she hadn’t done it since. The pediatrician said it wasn’t uncommon, that she’d outgrow it.

Through the porch door’s window, the eastern horizon glowed, turning the lake surface purple, but the dock was a black finger with a black boat’s silhouette beside it. A muskrat swam, cutting a long V in the flat water.

The knob turned under his hand. It turned again. Whoever held it on the other side was shorter than the window. Poul slapped his head against the glass. A bare stair. He ran to the kitchen, banging his shin against a stool, breath ragged in his throat, grabbed the deadbolt key from its drawer, and stumbled back to the porch. Outside, he looked up and down the shore. A quarter mile away, his closest neighbor loaded fishing gear into his boat. Poul ran around the cottage. There was no one. Mindless, he sprinted up the long dirt driveway until he stopped at the highway, bent, with his hands on his thighs, gasping. Empty road vanished into the woods on either side.

He sat on the shoulder. A deep gouge in his left foot bled freely, and he realized both feet hurt. It took ten minutes to hobble back to the cottage, and wearing only shorts, he was profoundly cold. The sun bathed the cottage’s front as he walked to the door. Grass cast long shadows. His own barefooted prints showed in the dew. Poul stopped before going in. Another set of prints led to his door, rounded impressions, small, like a child wearing galoshes, coming from the lake. Then, as if the sun was an eraser passing over the yard, the dew vanished.

Leesa took Savannah into town for lunch and shopping. They needed to stock the refrigerator and freezer, and Savannah decided she couldn’t live without fruit juice in the squeezable packages.

Poul sat in a lawn chair at the foot of the pier for most of the morning. The sun pressed against his forehead and eventually filled him with lazy heat. Ripples caught the light, sending it in bright, little spears at him. Waves lapped the shore. The boat, tied to the dock, thudded hollowly every once in a while like a huge aluminum drum.

If he shut his eyes, it could be thirty years earlier. The sun beat the same way, and the same ripply chorus floated in the air. On the beach he and Neal had talked about deep sea diving and fish. Poul was frustrated. He had a wonderful face mask, fins to push himself along and a snorkel, but the mask was too buoyant. He could dive underwater, but he couldn’t stay near the fascinating bottom where the catfish lived. So he had a brain storm. In the boathouse he found a pair of rubber snow boots he’d left from January when he and Dad had come to the lake to fix a frozen pipe. They were supposed to fit over shoes, so his bare foot slopped around. He held the top open. “Fill them up, Neal,” he said.

His brother looked at them doubtfully. “Why do you want to do that?”

“Cause this will keep me from floating.”

“Oh,” Neal said with admiration. He used a yellow, plastic shovel to dump sand in. When it was full, Poul forced the bottom buckle closed. The sand squeezed his leg; he fastened the next one, and it was even tighter. Sand spilled over the top. After the last buckle, there was a strap that cinched the boot closed. It felt like his feet were in grainy cement; he couldn’t even wiggle his toes.

Neal laughed when Poul tried to walk. Each foot must have weighed an extra ten pounds, and it was all he could do to shuffle forward. Poul adjusted his face mask and snorkel. “Wish me luck.”

“Luck,” said Neal. “Find the big catfish, okay?”

Poul nodded as he waded out. The water slapped higher on his body with each step from shore. When it reached his armpits, he put the snorkel in, then slowly squatted, his feet holding firm beneath him. He turned; underwater, the sand held ripples, a sculpture of the surface motion, while the underside of the surface undulated, meeting the beach at the shore. Then he stood, blew water from the snorkel and gave Neal a thumbs up. Neal waved back.

A few steps deeper, and the water line rose on the face mask. Another step and he was completely underwater, breathing through the snorkel. No fish, but a lot of suspended material, bits of algae. Exotic noises. A buzz that must have been a boat cruising along. A metallic clink that might be a chain under the diving platform a hundred feet away. His breath wheezing in and out of the snorkel. Other, unidentifiable sounds. Poul the adventurer, an explorer of undiscovered countries.

Then, a fish just at his vision’s edge, much deeper, swam along the bottom. Poul froze, hoping it would come close, but it stayed maddeningly far. He moved toward it, sliding his foot only a few inches. It flicked away, then appeared again, still now, head on, as if it were watching him. An encounter with an alien would not have felt any more exotic. Poul leaned toward the fish, his hand out. A gesture of hello.

Water filled his mouth, straight into his throat and he was choking. It hurt! Eyes tearing, he looked up. He’d gone too deep. The top of the snorkel was below the surface. Blind panic! He flailed his arms, trying to swim up, but his feet didn’t budge. He jerked, screaming through the snorkel. No air! No air! He turned toward shore, and took a step. He took another, then blew hard, clearing the water and breathed in gasps. Without pause, he continued toward shore. When he was shallow enough, he ripped the face mask off and sucked one huge breath after another. By the time he got to shore, his throat quit hurting, but he wanted to get away, to lay down and cry. He could feel it in his chest, the horrible pressure of no air, the moment when he didn’t dare inhale.

“Did you see a fish?” Neal asked. He was sitting with his toes in the water, arms wrapped around his knees. “Was it totally cool?”

Poul shook his head, hiding his tears by unbuckling the boots. He scraped his feet pulling them out. Later that day Dad would smear first aid cream on them, his eyes unfocussed, his hands shaking.

Poul left the boots on the beach and went into the woods to cry. He’d never been so scared. He’d never been so scared! And when he returned an hour later, Mom was walking up the shore, calling Neal’s name. “Where’s your brother?” She’d asked, her eyes already wild. “Weren’t you watching Neal?”

Poul rose from the lawn chair; he could feel the nylon webbing creases in his backside. Neal was six, he thought. Savannah is six. The two facts came together with inevitable weight. For years he hadn’t thought much about Neal’s death. Every once in a while, a memory would flare: the two of them talking late at night, after they were supposed to be asleep, the model airplane Neal had given him for his birthday, the words carefully inscribed on the back, For mi big brother. Luve, Neal. Neal trusted him, looked up to him, but most of the time Neal didn’t exist anymore. Then Savannah was born, and Neal came back, a little stronger each summer. Maybe that’s what Leesa sensed: the younger brother, dead within him.

Savannah is six, Poul thought, and Neal has been waiting.

He went through the cottage and made sure the screens were tight. It wouldn’t do for the house to be filled with mosquitoes when Leesa and Savannah returned. For a moment he held a pen over a notepad in the kitchen, but put it down without writing. A beach towel went over his shoulder, and he walked to the end of the pier. Standing with his toes wrapped over the edge, a breeze in his face, felt like leaning over an abyss. Beyond the drop-off, he saw no bottom. The big fish were there, the fishy mysteries he’d left to Neal.

He dove in, a long shallow dive that took him yards away without a stroke. Water rushed by his ears. Bubbles streamed from his nose. He came to the surface, treaded. From his shoulders to his knees, the lake was warm, a comfortable temperature perfect for swimming, but from the knees down it was cold. Neal hadn’t known how to swim, he thought. To even go on the pier, Dad had made him put on a life jacket, and Poul was the older brother. How many times had he been told to protect him, to watch out for him? And it didn’t matter what he’d been told, Poul wanted to keep his brother safe. At the playground, he listened for Neal’s voice. When someone cried, Poul stopped, afraid it was Neal. Loving his brother was like inhaling.

Neal went into the lake; he never came out. Neal must have hated him, Poul thought. At the end, he must have cried out for him, but Poul didn’t come. He didn’t warn him.

Poul swam deeper, put his face down, eyes open. Without a mask, his hands were blurry. Beyond them, blackness. How deep? Were there pike? He imagined a ghost catfish, its eye as broad as a swimming pool rising toward him.

But try as he might, Poul couldn’t drown himself. He floated on his back, letting his feet sink until his weight drew his face under, and just when the time came to breathe, he kicked to the surface. He couldn’t let the water in. Swimming parallel to the shore, he passed Kettle Jack’s, swam by dozens of cottages like his own until his arms tired. Each stroke hurt, his shoulders burning with exhaustion, but they never quit working. The lake let him live, and Neal never came up to join him. Poul waited for a hand (a small hand) to wrap around his ankle, to pull him down where six-year-olds never grow older. Instead, the sun moved across the sky until Poul was empty. Completely dull, drained and damaged, he turned toward shore, staggered up a stranger’s beach, and walked on the lake road toward his cottage, staying in the shoulder, where the grass didn’t hurt his feet.

If Neal didn’t want him, who did he want?

This far above Kettle Jack’s was unfamiliar to him, but the look was the same: long, dirt driveways that vanished in the trees below, or led to cottages camped along the shore. Old boats sprawled upside down on saw horses. Bamboo fishing poles leaned against weathered wood. Station wagons or vans parked behind each house. Towels drying on lines. Beyond, in the lake, sailboats cut frothy wakes; the wind had picked up, although he didn’t feel it much here.

He started walking faster. Leesa and Savannah would be home by now. He wondered what they were doing. Leesa never watched Savannah like he did. Her philosophy was that kids take care of themselves, generally, and it’s healthier for a child to have room to explore.

He hadn’t realized how far he’d swam. Way ahead, the tip of Kettle Jack’s pier poked into the lake. Maybe Savannah and Leesa would walk there to see Johnny Jacob’s kittens. But it was hot, and Savannah hadn’t swam yet. Yesterday she’d fished. Today she’d want to swim. He could see the scene. Leesa would pull into the driveway. Savannah would put on her swim suit to go out on the beach. She had sand toys, buckets, shovels, rakes; little molds for making sand castles. Leesa would set up a chair, lather in sun lotion and read a book. Savannah could be in the water now.

Poul broke into a jog. How idiotic it was to leave the cottage, he thought. No, not idiotic. Criminal. If vengeance waited in the lake, if some sort of delayed retribution haunted the cold waters, why would it care for him? Where would his suffering be if he drowned, like Neal, relieved of responsibility at last? He was running. Kettle Jack’s passed by on his left. It was a mile to his cottage. He’d swam over a mile! And maybe that was the plan: to get him out into the lake and away. Suddenly he felt as if he’d lost his mind. What was he thinking? What sane father would dive into the water away from his daughter? Savannah is six, he thought, and she needs her daddy.

The van was parked behind the cottage. Poul ran to the front, his breath coming in great whoops. Empty lounge chair. Sand toys on the beach. A child’s life vest lying next to the boathouse. No sign of her. He yelled, “Savannah!” as he went through the door onto the porch.

Leesa sat at the kitchen table, eating a sandwich. “What’s wrong with you?” she said.

“Where’s Savannah?”

“Puttering around in that raft I bought her. We had a heck of a time finding it.”

“I didn’t see her!” he said as he ran out of the kitchen.

Out front, he scanned the lake again. Boats in the distance. No yellow raft. He had a vision: Savannah paddling, looking at the bottom through the clear plastic. Sand, of course; she’d see sand and minnows. Then she’d move farther out, her head down, hoping for fish, not aware of how far from shore she was going. The water would get deeper. She’d be beyond the sand, where the depths were foggy and dark green. “What is that?” she’d think. A moving shadow, a form resolving itself, a face coming from below. The little boy from beneath the pier.

Poul pounded down the dock, scanning the water to the left and right. Leesa followed.

“She was right here a minute ago! I’ve only been inside a minute!”

At the dock’s end, Poul stopped, within a eye blink of diving in, but the water was clear as far as he could see. Even the sailboats had retreated from sight.

“Maybe she went to see the kittens,” Leesa said.

“With the raft? She wouldn’t go with the raft!” Poul’s voice cracked.

A bird flew by, wings barely moving. It seemed to Poul to almost have stopped. His heart beat in slow explosions. Leesa said something, but her meaning didn’t reach him, the words were so far apart. Then, a round shape pushed from beneath the pier. At first he thought it was the top of a blonde head, right under his feet, and it moved a little bit further, becoming too broad to be a head, and too yellow to be blonde. It was the raft. He could feel himself saying, “No,” as he bent, already knowing Savannah wouldn’t be in it. He tugged on its handle. It resisted. Who is holding on? It slid out. No one held it. Six inches of water in the bottom made it heavy.

“Savannah!” Leesa screamed. Then the bird’s wings beat twice and it was gone. Poul’s pulse sped up. The lake had never seemed so empty. He remembered Dad, who had stood at the end of the pier, mute, when they pulled Neal out. Now he stood on the same board.

A high voice called from the lake, a child. Poul looked up, his skin suddenly cold. It called again, and Poul saw her, lying on the diving platform a hundred feet away. Savannah.

He didn’t know how he got there—he didn’t remember swimming, but he was up the diving platform’s ladder, holding his weeping daughter instantly. She nestled her head under his chin and shook with tears. Before she stopped, Leesa arrived in the boat, and they both held her.

Finally, when Savannah’s crying had settled into a sob every minute or two, Leesa said, “How did you get out here, darling? You scared us so.”

Between shuddery breaths, Savannah said, “I didn’t mean to go so far, and I couldn’t get back. I paddled really hard, but I fell out. The wind pushed the raft away.”

She looked from Poul to Leesa, her eyes red-rimmed and teary.

“I swallowed water, Daddy. I couldn’t breathe.”

Poul swallowed. He could feel the snorkel in his mouth, the solid, leaden ache of water in his lungs.

Leesa gasped, “Thank God you made it to the diving platform. We could have lost you,” and she burst into tears herself.

Through Leesa’s crying, Savannah looked at Poul solemnly. “I didn’t swim, Daddy. The little boy helped me. He took my hand and put me here.” Savannah rubbed her eyes with the back of her arm. “He kissed my cheek, Daddy.”

Poul nodded, incapable of speech.

“He looked like the boy in your baby pictures.” She sniffed, but seemed more relaxed, her fear already becoming vague. “My eyes didn’t play tricks on me.”




Poul spent the sunset sitting on the end of the pier, his toes dipping in the lake, surrounded by the watery symphony. Aqueous rhythms beating against the wood, lapping against the shore. And fish. He sat quietly, and the fish came: a school of blue gill, scales catching the last light in a thousand glitters swirling in front of him and then were gone. Later, when the sun had nearly disappeared, a long, black shape glided by, its eye as big as a quarter, a long row of teeth visible when it opened its mouth. Poul had finally seen a pike.

He sighed, pushed himself up and found Leesa in the kitchen. She’d already put Savannah to bed in their room upstairs.

She looked at her coffee cup dully. It was almost hard to remember what he’d loved about her when they’d first met, then she turned her head a little and brushed back her hair, and for a second, it was there, a picture of Leesa when they were young. Before Savannah. Before coming to the lake had become so reluctant. The second disappeared.

He pulled a chair out for himself and turned it around so he could lean his arms on the back. She didn’t speak. Poul shut his eyes to listen to the woods behind the cottage. The air there was always so moist and living, but it didn’t penetrate into the kitchen. With his eyes closed, he could swear he was alone in the room.

“I want a divorce,” Poul said.

Leesa looked at him directly for maybe the first time in a year. “Why now?”

The low, slanting sun cut through the trees behind the cottage, casting a yellow light in the room. He knew that on the lake, now, it highlighted the waves, but didn’t penetrate the depths. Fisherman would be out, because the big fish, the serious fish moved in the evening. The evening was the best time to be on the lake, after a hard day of swimming, of hiking in the woods where he’d played with Neal, and just before they went to bed to tell each other stories until sleep took them, two brothers under one blanket lying head to head, and they dreamed.

Poul said, “When you realize a thing is bad, you’ve got to let it go or you’ll drown.”




About the Author


James Van Pelt teaches high school and college English in western Colorado. He has been publishing fiction since 1990, with numerous appearances in most of the major science fiction and fantasy magazines, including Talebones, Realms of Fantasy, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, Analog, Asimov’s, Weird Tales, SCIFI.COM, and many anthologies, including several “year’s best” collections. His first collection of stories, Strangers and Beggars, was released in 2002, and was recognized as a Best Book for Young Adults by the American Library Association. His second collection, The Last of the O-Forms and Other Stories, which includes the Nebula finalist title story, was released in August 2005 and was a finalist for the Colorado Blue Spruce Young Adult Book Award. His novel Summer of the Apocalypse was released November, 2006. His third collection, The Radio Magician and Other Stories, was released in 2009. James blogs at http://jimvanpelt.livejournal.com




Publication History


“Flying in the Heart of the Lafayette Escadrille” first appeared in Quantum (1999)

“Father’s Dragon” first appeared in On Spec (2001)

“Just Before Recess” first appeared in Flash Fiction Online (2008)

“O Tannenbaum” first appeared in Weird Tales (1998)

“Night Sweats” first appeared in Realms of Fantasy (2001)

“Teaching” first appeared in Star Anthology #1 (1998/1999)

“Working the Moon Circuit” first appeared in Footprints (2009)

“Plant Life” first appeared in Aberrations (1993)

“That He Might Yet Find the Unknown” first appeared in Altair (2000)

“Floaters” first appeared in Talebones (2008)

“The Road’s End” first appeared in Realms of Fantasy (2006)

“One in a Thousand” first appeared in Altair (2000)

“Rock House” first appeared in Talebones (2006)

“Mrs. Hatcher’s Evaluation” first appeared in Asimov’s (2012)

“Far From the Emerald Isle” first appeared in Analog (2002)

“Howl Above the Din” first appeared in Talebones (2000)

“No Small Change” first appeared in After Hours (1991)

“The Saint From Abdijan” first appeared in Extremes, Darkest Africa (2002)

“Ark Ascension” first appeared in Analog (1999)

“Working Pushout” first appeared in The Third Alternative (2001)

“Notes From the Field” first appeared in 3SF (2002)

“Classroom of the Living Dead” first appeared in Daily Science Fiction (2011)

“Savannah is Six” first appeared in Dark Terrors 5 (2000)




Fairwood Press books by James Van Pelt


The Radio Magician

Summer of the Apocalypse

The Last of the O-Forms

Strangers and Beggars




Copyright





Flying in the Heart of the Lafayette Escadrille

A Fairwood Press Book

November 2012

Copyright © 2012 by James Van Pelt

All Rights Reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Fairwood Press

21528 104th Street Court East

Bonney Lake, WA 98391

www.fairwoodpress.com

Front cover image by Elena Vizerskaya

Book design by Patrick Swenson

ISBN13: 978-1-933846-34-7

First Fairwood Press Edition: November 2012

Printed in the United States of America

eISBN: 978-1-61824-991-3

Electronic version by Baen Books

http://www.baen.com