fromprison2002 - Tumblr blog

fromprison2002 · 4 months

Text

Story

Green Fields by Maria Hummer

We were told to pay attention to things that were different, and it seemed to me that sex was no longer the same. Now, we always wondered if someone was watching. It wasn't clear to us which sections were private, and how the technology worked. It was also hard not to picture our real bodies somewhere in the frozen dark, motionless while we moved together here in the seeming warm.

I brought it up in my sessions with the Reverend. He told me he was surprised it had taken me so long to ask. The others had worried about it in Cycle 1.

‘Which Cycle are we in?’ I asked. It was difficult to keep track.

‘Cycle 3,’ said the Reverend. ‘I understand your concern, but of course nobody watches you. It was part of the privacy agreement we signed at the start. Don't you remember?’

I did. That is, I hadn’t until the Reverend mentioned it. The memory was there, but it felt very far away. And maybe it was. We hadn't been told precisely how long the experiment would take. We wouldn't know until we were unfrozen at the end, our bodies still in their thirties and our minds at god-knows-what age. But the money was good. Sam and I would be able to afford a nice wedding and a honeymoon to Hawaii, and only one of us would need to work while the other stayed home with the kids we hoped to have. That is, if we were still fertile at the end. It was one of the risks.

Our life together before the VR world was still clear in my mind and I looked back on it often: Sam and me walking together to rehearsals, our first kiss in the snow, our apartment above Shipley Automotive, taking care of each other through winter fevers. Our memories made in the VR world were less acute, but we were happy, we had each other, and we never got sick. Only couples were accepted for the experiment — ‘deeply committed couples’, in fact, and there was a test we had had to take to determine how committed we were. One of the questions was: ‘If you were offered a place in heaven without your partner, would you still go?’ We both selected ‘no’. The other people in the experiment were Manny and Biake, childhood sweethearts who wanted the money to raise a family, and Susan and Letitia, who planned to start a business together when they got out. ‘I just hope no one else thinks of our idea in the meantime, said Letitia. The six of us were sitting around the table in the communal space, experiencing - it was difficult to think of it as ‘eating’ — dinner. That day it was paella, wafting cartoonish puffs of steam. There was obviously no need to eat, but the routine kept us sane. It was for this same reason that we retired to our own rooms after dinner to watch TV with our partners and sleep.

‘What's your idea?’ asked Manny.

‘I'm not telling you,’ said Letitia. “You'll steal it if you get out first.’

‘If I remember it, said Manny.

There was an order of departure from the experiment that none of us understood. We had all begun at the same time, but so far we'd already said goodbye to two couples, including a pair who had had to leave several days apart from each other. I tried to ask the Reverend about it in our sessions, but he wouldn't explain.

‘Were contractually obliged to tell you everything when you wake up,’ he said, ‘but not before.’

The Reverend was the only one who came and went between worlds. We knew he had assistants, but none of them ever joined us here. If the Reverend needed help with something in the VRW, he'd use one of us. It’s what we were there for.

We all had our tasks. We weren't allowed to discuss them with anyone but our partners, so [ wasn't sure what everybody else did all day. I wasn’t even really sure what Sam did, because his task was to assist the Reverend, so it required an additional level of secrecy. I was adept at spatial reasoning, according to a massive test I'd taken before the start of the experiment, so my tasks usually involved exploring buildings or landscapes. I wandered through forests, fields, gardens, palaces, and rooms whose doors never led to the same place twice. I was often given the same bright green hillside with purple blossoms and blue sky.

Sometimes I'd hike for what seemed like hours and never reach the top. Other times I'd take just a few steps and suddenly be heading down the other side. There was a stream in the hillside landscape. Sometimes it was at the bottom of the hill, sometimes not. I walked around, picked flowers, skipped stones. Often the flowers would disappear moments after being picked; other times they refused to be picked at all. Once the grass wouldn't give at my footsteps and I had to walk gingerly along the tips. These were glitches and I was supposed to record them out loud. ‘Glitch: grass doesn’t bend when I step on it.’ ‘Glitch: stream floating one foot off the ground.’ ‘Glitch: tree swaying like a loose rope.’

Once in a while the glitch was so astonishing - like one time when the landscape just ended and I found myself walking and not walking through a weird grey nothing - that I would forget to record it, I would just look around with my mouth open.

After each of these sessions I filled out a short form. The form would ask me to report, for example, if I had seen a bird, what it had been perching on, and what colour it had been. Often I couldn't remember. We had all signed an honesty agreement before entering the experiment and I didn’t want to forfeit my payment by getting caught in a lie, so I would write, ‘I don’t remember. Many of my completed forms were filled with I-don't-remembers.

Every week - every month? year? it was difficult to tell — we would have a Group Challenge. On these days we would gather in the Reverend’s workshop, where he gave each of us an envelope with our instructions inside. Find the cat. Search for and report any instances of the colour blue. Sometimes we'd all have the same task, but other times they would be conflicting, like when Letitia and I were told to make sure nobody went in the caves, and everyone else had to try to get into them. Teamwork, problem solving, conflict resolution. The Group Challenges often took place in landscapes I had explored, and some of the challenges seemed to be timed, because back in his Workshop the Reverend would comment on occasion, ‘In record speed.’

We begged to be told how long in Outside Hours - OH for short — these challenges took, but the only thing the Reverend ever told us in real OH was that our nights were three hours long. ‘Enough to dream, he said. But I never did.

Some people had difficulty adjusting to the VRW in the beginning. Letitia begged for the chance to video-call her sister, but we weren't allowed to contact anyone in the RW. It was all there in the contracts we signed. Letitia grew depressed. She began to eat whenever, whatever she could. There were no consequences like gaining weight, but the Reverend still called her in for extra sessions. VRW or not, sadness is still sadness. An addiction still an addiction. Sam and I were relatively fine. Our families respected our decision and we had no regrets. The tough part for me, though, was getting used to walking without feeling myself walk. In the VRW if you wanted to move in a particular direction you thought about it and it happened, but you didn't feel your knees bend and creak like you did in the RW. I was a dancer. I was used to the sensation of my own body in space. I mentioned this to the Reverend.

‘And does that get in the way of your enjoyment of life here?’ he asked.

I thought about it. Really, it was more than just the walking and moving. It was the sex. Our bodies didn't feel like bodies in each other's hands. I missed our clumsy knees, our animal stench.

‘I would say it does,’ I replied.

But that was in the beginning. Either the Reverend followed up on my comments and tweaked the programming, or I just got used to it.

‘Do you think the Reverend is real?’ I asked Sam one evening in our room.

The window was open to some simulation of a warm breeze. The brilliantly constellated night sky was like a mix between a Van Gogh painting and the kind of stars you remember from childhood.

‘He's not physically real, no, said Sam. ‘But neither are we.

‘But is he a representation of a real person, like us?’ I asked. ‘Susan thinks maybe they're testing artificial intelligence. They want to see how long we all take orders from a thing without realising.’

‘How do you know Susan is real?’ said Sam.

‘Because we met her,’ I said. ‘In the orientation, in the RW, remember? The day before they - before the start of this whole thing.’

It was still difficult to say before they froze us.

In the RW Sam was a musician. He had been in the orchestra for one of my dance shows, and that was how we'd met. In our VRW apartment he'd been given a piano, a sleek baby grand, something we could never afford outside. But when Sam sat down to play, the music sounded awful. It sounded like a piano, but it was too perfect, too much in tune. He asked the Reverend if it could be fixed, but the Reverend had trouble understanding exactly what the problem was. He said he would look into it, and the piano stayed the same. The music was supposed to be confined to our apartment, but at times a glitch meant that I could hear it in a different section of the world. Sound was something the programmers seemed to have real trouble with. In the RW, sound waves are born and die in a fixed location as dictated by the laws of science. But in the VRW the laws had to be carefully programmed, which meant details were often overlooked. Sometimes I would hear Letitia and Susan talking even though they were nowhere in sight. Other times I would be startled by someone suddenly appearing behind me because the programme didn’t generate the sound of their footsteps.

Occasionally bigger glitches happened. Like I'd roll over in bed and fall straight through the floor, landing in some half-finished chamber with walls that started and ended nowhere. Sometimes I would get stuck in a terrifying loop, first in one place and then suddenly in another, or I’d see Sam in two places at once, or I'd hear his voice behind my shoulder saying something he’d tried to say an hour ago, or even further in the past. One time I saw a duck near a pond in one of my landscapes, nuzzling its head under its wing. As I stepped closer it turned and looked at me and I swear it had the face of my grandmother.

The system crashed once, very early into the experiment, and we all blacked out for a while, hearing nothing, seeing nothing, only aware of the passing of time. When the world flickered back, I found myself climbing a spiral staircase in a tower. Manny was waiting at the top. One by one the others arrived too. Sam was the last, followed soon after by the Reverend. Then we all turned around silently and went back downstairs, ending up in the familiar common room. Susan thought maybe we had all woken for a moment in our boxes. The Reverend would neither confirm nor deny this.

The system almost crashed again in Cycle 2 when Letitia, leading a ‘revolt’, tried to force an overload by bombarding the programme with requests. She recruited everyone to her cause ~ even me, even Sam. Nothing much happened, just a few warning pop-ups sprouting at our feet and sailing into the sky, bearing cryptic codes like P2overDS1. The Reverend stopped us before it could get too far.

‘I appreciate this is difficult for you,’ he said, ‘but please bear in mind the agreement you signed. Any action taken in opposition to the spirit of the study puts you at risk of forfeiting your end payment.

‘Tell us what you're testing,’ said Letitia. ‘Tell us how long it’s been.’

‘We will', said the Reverend.

Then he told us he had a surprise. A brand new programme had just been finished, a flight programme, which every single one of us had been requesting since the start. We spent a happy day ~- a happy week? ~ soaring around a sunny hillside, whooping and laughing, and the revolt was forgotten. Flying - it felt so familiar. Like all the dreams I wished I'd had.

We entered Cycle 4. I couldn't remember how many cycles there were supposed to be in total. I wanted to ask the Reverend in my sessions, but it was beginning to be embarrassing how little my memory retained. It seemed like every session I asked him a question I'd already asked, possibly several times before. Often these questions were about Sam.

‘We might be having trouble in our relationship, I said.

‘I know, said the Reverend. ‘We discussed this last time.’

‘Oh. And what was your answer last time?’

He said something but I wasn’t listening. In fact, I’d already forgotten my question.

‘Is there anything else?’ he asked.

‘No,’ I said. ‘Yes. Why do we call you the Reverend?’

The Reverend laughed. ‘This question again,’ he said.

I felt annoyed. It wasn’t my fault I asked the same questions again and again. Weren't the programmers supposed to be working on memory retention?

‘You know, he said, ‘you're actually the only one who calls me that.’

‘Tam?’

‘My name is Alexander.’

‘Why do I call you the Reverend?’

‘I don't know, he said.

It was time for a Group Challenge. We met in the Reverend’s Workshop for our envelopes. I opened mine. It was blank.

‘Excuse me, I said.

‘No time for questions,’ said the Reverend.

He opened a door to a small room and told us to wait inside. The door closed.

We all looked at each other with tight smiles. Things were always a little tense at the beginning of a Group Challenge.

I wanted Sam to put his arm around me but I knew he wouldn't. Lately he’d begun to seem very far away. He didn't talk to me as much as he used to, but he couldn't share what he was working on with the Reverend so there wasn't a lot we could talk about. We used to pass the time reminiscing about life before the experiment, or planning our wedding for afterwards, but lately when I mentioned these things he got strange and quiet. I wished our real bodies weren't in separate boxes, in different rooms, because at least physical closeness makes emotional distance easier to bear. The first thing I wanted to do when the experiment was over was hold Sam, really hold him, smell his neck, smell his hair.

The door opened again. It led to what seemed to be a train station platform.We walked onto it. There were three benches. Manny and Blake took one, Susan and Letitia took another. I sat down on the third and expected Sam to join me but he didn’t. He paced around, and then stood in front of a map and tried to read it, squinting his eyes. A habit. Squinting wouldn't make things any easier to read here. I joined him and we looked at the map together. It was all slanted and skewed, like we were looking at it through moving water.

‘Guys,’ said Blake, ‘this is our train.’

A train was pulling into the station. No one was driving it and there were no other passengers in its six cars.

‘How do you know?’ said Letitia. “Was that written in your envelope?’

‘I just know we have to get on.

The train doors slid open and we entered. We saw that the seats were labelled. Blake and Manny sat beneath their names. Susan and Letitia saw their names further down the car. I followed them. They sat down and I kept walking. In the next car I found my name above a seat, but it was all by itself. I didn’t see Sam’s name anywhere. That's when I realised he wasn't following me. I was all alone. I looked around. There he was, on the platform. The doors were already shut.

‘Wait,’ I said. ‘We need to wait for Sam.’

I ran to a window and called to him to get on. He just smiled and shrugged, lifting the piece of paper from his envelope: Don’t board the train. I didn't like what was happening. We had never done a Group Challenge without Sam. I tried to open the train door but it wouldn't budge. ‘Open,’ I said. And then, ‘Glitch. Door won't open. Please open door.’

The train started to move.

‘Wait,’ I shouted. Sam got further away and then he was gone. The train sped up, heading for a tunnel. The tunnel was dark. Everything dissolved. I could hear the train running on the tracks but I could no longer see or feel anything. And then I was struck with a sensation so intense I knew instantly, horribly, that it was real.

My body tingled. My fingertips, my toes. Everything tingled like I had been plugged into an electrical socket and was being turned on. The roar of the train grew louder.

‘Sam, I tried to yell, but no sound was made.

* * * * *

Voices first, and then the light. People talking. Shadows as hands passed silver instruments above my head. The light. I felt it in my entire body like a cramp.

‘She’s back,’ someone said, and the room quieted down and emptied until it was just me and a woman in a white coat.

‘Sam,’ I croaked.

‘Shh,’ said the woman. ‘Relax. Take your time.’

I blinked. Or maybe I fell asleep, because when I opened my eyes the woman was in a different part of the room. I asked for Sam again. It was difficult to find the energy. Everything felt slow and heavy ~ my body, the air around me.

‘Try to relax, she said.

I turned my head and saw a window. The world outside was dull, grey, lost in a cloud. It was all wrong.

The woman said something but I didn't catch it.

‘What?’ I said.

‘What?’ she said.

‘You said something.’

‘You mean when I asked if you wanted anything to eat? That was almost half an hour ago.’

‘No, you said...’ I could barely get the words out. I choked, then started to retch. The woman hurried over with a bucket and caught my vomit. She wiped my face.

When I opened my eyes again there was a different person in the room, fiddling with some things inside a drawer.

“Where's the Reverend?’ I asked. My voice didn't sound like my own.

The person looked up. ‘Who?’

‘The Reverend.’

The person didn’t answer. He just wrote something on a clipboard and walked away.

I slept again.

When I woke, someone was coming into the room. The woman in the white coat. She sat beside my bed and crossed her legs.

‘How are you feeling?’ she asked.

Feeling. How was I feeling? I didn't know. There was too much. The heat of my legs under blankets. The whirring of machines in my room and down the hall. The beat of my heart, which felt too fast. An ache in my elbows and knees. A thirst so powerful I felt it everywhere.

‘Water, I said.

She smiled and brought me a cup. I needed help sitting up, and then when I tried to drink the water I coughed most of it back up. She patted my back gently until the coughing was done. I tried again, and managed to drink most of it.

‘There you go,’ she said. She wrote something down on a clipboard. ‘Are you having trouble with the passage of time?’

‘What?’

‘What?’ she said. Her legs were crossed the other way now. When had she shifted?

The clipboard in her hands was gone.

‘Glitch,’ I said.

‘There are no glitches here, she said.

‘But I saw...’

‘Just rest,’ she said, standing up. ‘We'll talk more later.’I didn't want her to go. I needed some questions answered, but I couldn’t remember what they were.

‘Wait, I said.

She turned and waited patiently.

‘Where...’

I needed to know where something was. No, someone. Someone important.

I could feel it right in the centre of my chest. My heart. Sam.

‘Where's Sam?’ | asked.

‘Later,’ was all she said. She left the room.

The night was impossibly long. I knew it was night because the grey outside the window had turned black. There were no stars. I slept a little, and I woke to black. I slept a little more, and woke to still more black. How long could one night be?

I was suspicious of everything around me. I didn't know if it was truly the real world, or if it was a Group Challenge gone horribly wrong. I was too weak to get out of my bed, so I waited.

After a fourth waking, the light outside had finally changed. People moved around outside my room. Finally, the woman in the white coat entered and said my name.

‘There’s someone here who'd like to see you, she said.

I tried to sit up. My heart fluttered, expecting Sam. But instead a grey-haired woman walked in. She had a cane. Her face was familiar in a way I didn't like. She said something to me.

‘What?’ I said. It was hard to make out because she was crying.

She covered her mouth with her hand and said something else. It sounded like maybe she was saying my name.

‘Grandma?’ | asked.

She shook her head no. The woman in the white coat led her out.

When she came back, the woman in the white coat said, ‘Alright. I’m ready now.

I was confused. ‘For what?’ I asked.

‘Didn't you have some questions you wanted to ask me?’

Did I? I wasn't sure.

‘Who are you?’ I asked.

‘We went over this yesterday,’ she said.

‘I thought the programmers were going to fix the memory problem,’ I said.

‘The Reverend told me.’

‘The memory problem is fixed. But you're in the real world now.’

I looked around. Things were dull and grey, yes, but they were too sharp, too clear to be anything but virtual.

The woman was speaking to me. I knew I should focus on her words but it was difficult.

‘I need to see the Reverend,’ I said. ‘Is the Group Challenge over yet?’

‘Yes,’ said the woman. She frowned. ‘It’s all over. The experiment is done.’

‘The Reverend always talks to us when the Group Challenge is over.

‘You're talking to him now. As I have explained.’

I felt sick. [had a stomach ache, and then it moved to my head. I had a queasy head.

‘It’s all over?’

‘Yese’

‘That can't be right.’ I was remembering something. Something from long before. ‘Sam and I were supposed to wake up in the same room. You... they told us. We were going to wake up together.’

There was a tap on the door and someone else came in. Another person in a white coat. ‘How's it going?’ he asked the woman softly, as if I was sleeping and he didn't want to wake me.

‘Her memory retention,’ she started to explain, also in a whisper, but I missed the rest of her words.

They whispered together for a while. Most of it was nonsense but I caught the phrase, ‘four other test subjects’.

‘Five other test subjects,’ | mumbled.

They looked at me.

‘There are six of us. Me and Sam and... Where's Sam?’

My words were garbled, and my attention was too; I wasn't sure my question was fully understood, and I struggled to focus as the woman in the white coat answered it.

‘What?’ I said.

She pointed at a stack of yellowed papers on the bedside table. I picked them up. The edges of the papers were curling and they were held together with a rusty staple. It was the agreement that Sam and I had signed before entering the VRW. I flipped through it and saw that some words were underlined in fresh ink: ‘strictly confidential’, ‘waives the right to discuss, share, or otherwise acknowledge’, and then, towards the end, ‘death’. This last word was underlined twice. I read its sentence carefully.

‘Both parties acknowledge that they are embarking upon the assignment as a deeply committed couple and, further, in the event of one party’s failure to complete the assignment, be it for reason of illness, death, or otherwise, the other party agrees to complete the assignment in full...’

I couldn't read any further. My eyes skipped to the bottom of the page, where Sam’s and my signatures had been scrawled. The ink was faded.

Something strange was happening to my eyes. They were leaking, making my cheeks wet. Alarmed, I was about to ask if this was another horrible side effect. And then I remembered tears.

‘What were you testing?’ I asked, but there was no one there to answer my question. I was alone.

I found that another piece of paper had appeared on my lap. A pamphlet. Onthe cover was a picture of a familiar hillside. Words on the top said: Welcome to Green Fields... And then on the bottom:... forever!

I let the pamphlet fall to the floor.

I stayed still for a while, just lying there. More tears were coming but they stopped eventually. Then it occurred to me that I'd already done so much lying down inside the frozen box that I didn’t want to do it any more. I thought about sitting up. I was confused when my body didn’t move, but then I remembered I would have to do it myself. That's how things worked here. I pressed my palms to the bed, tensed my muscles, and pushed myself up. For the first time in a lifetime I could feel my own heaviness and pain.

0 notes

fromprison2002 · 4 months

Text

A Modern Christmas Short Story

Juyanne James

The Meeting

My grandmother’s house is a place I often go to in my dreams—and sometimes I go there for real. The house sits bravely near the edge of an old country road; its only protection from the harsh world is a stout and mighty chinaberry tree that my grandfather must have planted over a hundred years ago. So, a while back, I’m invited to a meeting at my grandmother's house. When I walk in, I wonder if I should be there. I still feel like the child I had been so many years before, my soul aching as much as my body ever did, looking for my mother to comfort me after being hit in the head with one of those little green berries, hoping that she would just this once allow me to remain in the house with the grown folks, and not outside with those heathen children.

On this day, when I go to the meeting, I open the door and the front room is still the same—only it’s winter now and a fire blazes quite genially in the fireplace. Over the mantel, the portrait of my grandmother and grandfather in their mid-lives hangs in just the way I remember it—my grandfather wearing his handsomeness like a badge across his broad chest and my grandmother leaning into her husband with one hand resting on his forearm. She also, in white, though now yellowed, and he in his one and only suit, now only a shade of black; it is the color of old death. Otherwise, the walls remain empty, like hospital rooms where the sick are expected to arrive soon.

I hear laughter and raucous conversation coming from the kitchen, which is the farthest room of the shotgun house, and I must walk through my grandparent’s bedroom to get there. The voices carry through the thin walls, and I begin to recognize who some of the people are. I cannot mistake my grandmother’s voice, which has always been deep but hollow like it flows through a thick tube of glass, and my mother’s as well, which is just a more youthful version of my grandmother's. I hear my Aunt Sherry, who is still busy trying to boss my mother around, even after all these years. This makes me smile, and I briefly think of how terribly young we all were back then, even the grownups.

Then everything gets weird because I think I hear Oprah telling someone to let her sit up close, next to Jesus, and Coretta Scott King saying that if anyone is going to sit at the right hand of the Lord, it should be her. There are other voices mingled in, and to tell the truth, I can hardly wait to get to the kitchen to see what’s really going on. I open the door—now there’s a door to the kitchen, but back in the old days, we just walked straight in—and have mercy, there is the Lord, my savior, Jesus the almighty, sitting at the head of this long table, you know the kind where you have to place an extension in the middle, only this extension is as wide, or wider, than the table itself; it’s like somebody, my grandmother I imagine, had invited too many important people for dinner, expecting perhaps that not all of them would actually show up, but when they do, she has to keep lengthening the table to accommodate them.

As I look around the room, I realize that there has been an extra room added on, and this isn’t the kitchen anymore but the dining room, and the kitchen is still beyond in a room added to the house.

My grandmother sees me standing there all mystified and confused, and she lifts one hand and motions for me to come on in, and says, “Close that door behind you.” She is standing, not sitting, just to the back and right of Jesus. She has on her apron and those same slippers that I remember her always wearing. My instinct tells me to run and hug her and give her an age-old kiss of greeting, but I see my mother, who I haven't seen in so many years, and I want to plant my eyes on her and leave them there, sure this time to follow her around so that she will not get away from me. It’s true. When I see my mother sitting next to Alice Walker, of all people, I feel like I am finally home. I want to ask Alice to move over and let me sit next to my mother, but I know that’s not going to happen, especially the way these women are arguing about who’s sitting where. Briefly, I wonder how the seating was arranged, and more importantly, who made the guest list.

“You are late,” my grandmother says to me, as if she is reading my state of mind and wants me to catch up with what’s going on. “Take a seat there.” She points to one of the two remaining seats.

“Hurry,” someone says, “Don’t let Satan try to steal his ass a seat.”

I realize it’s Missy Elliott, who sits on the opposite side of the table across from Alice Walker, and next to my Aunt Sherry.

Everyone in the room nods their agreement, and their eyes tell me to sit down, quickly.

I can’t help the befuddledness of my motions; I can barely move. Looking down the table at all these precious guests, well, it stills my heart. ] may as well be a butterfly trying to land on each of their shoulders. I am floating in a moment in time, just holding on as best I can.

Jesus then speaks, and I think about true freedom, how none of us ever know how it feels. “I have looked forward to eating this meal with you,” he says. “Let us pass the bread and divide it evenly among you.” So he breaks the loaf of bread and takes a small piece for himself and then passes the two larger pieces to the women sitting next to him, my first grade teacher, Mrs. Corning, on one hand and Zora Neale Hurston on the other. My teacher breaks off a piece and passes it on to Oprah, and Zora takes a piece and passes it on to Mrs. King. Oprah, to Aretha Franklin; Mrs. King, to my mother; Aretha, to my Aunt Sherry; my mother, to Alice Walker; Aunt Sherry, to Missy Elliott; and Alice, well, she has no one to pass the bread to unless she reaches over the empty chair and gives it to me, but Missy Elliott has already practically thrown the final, piddley piece that has come down that side of the table to me (this is that fresh version of Missy, when she first came out with a hit record). Alice and I look at Aretha and say nothing. Alice places half of her bread on the plate of the missing guest. I wonder if anyone, besides me, wants to know why my grandmother will not take her seat.

“I am to remain standing,” she says, again, as if reading my mind.

“Who is greater,” Jesus asks no one in particular, “the one who sits here at the table with you or the one who will serve you? Anyone who wishes to be first must be last. You must be the servants of all.”

Before anyone can answer the riddle, my grandmother tells me to go and get the woman in the kitchen. I obey without asking the logical questions “Why?” or “Shouldn’t I be here to discuss what Jesus has just proposed?” Never mind, I go.

As I am walking past Oprah, I hear her say to Aretha, “Perhaps we could get you to sing a song while we’re waiting for the next guest to arrive.” I don’t hear Aretha’s reply, but I must admit to myself, I would love to hear something off the Amazing Grace album or if that fails, her Greatest Hits will do.

When I open the door to this new kitchen, the one that has been added to my grandmother’s house, seemingly just for this occasion, I see an aging black woman, in a maid’s dark uniform with a white apron. She looks prematurely old, like life has beaten the shit out of her. She is bent over the stove, stirring something that is bubbling and leaving circles of steam floating up to her face. I wonder how my grandmother can suddenly afford a maid.

“Mmn, that’s just about perfect,” this woman says to me. She speaks as though she has known me all my life. “You know, it’s your favorite: blueberry cobbler.”

And even though I don’t know this lady from Adam or Eve or any of their offspring, I suddenly want to ask her to be my new best friend.

“Don’t worry about it,” she says. “These things been decided long ago.

l ignore that last remark and remember why I’ve come. “My grandmother says for you to come there. Now.” This part I add for emphasis, like I am in charge of this shindig.

“Oh, she did,” the woman says.

“Yes, Ma’am.” I have remembered my manners.

And the woman lays down her spoon and follows me, like I am Jesus petitioning his disciples. I look back, wondering how my cobbler is going to be finished. She hadn’t even rolled out the crust yet.

She tells me, “It'll be alright. Don’t worry.”

When we get back to the other room, it seems as though every voice is raised in disagreement. I truly can’t believe these women are behaving so rudely, in front of Jesus. It’s like they have no faith in the system, no trust that things will be done to their satisfaction.

I hear my aunt, who never was one to wait, for anything, ask Aretha to sing, “Mary, Don’t You Weep.” But before Aretha can answer, my teacher, Mrs. Corning, says, “No, you know what I’d love to hear? ‘Order My Steps.” My teacher and I smile because we both know this is her favorite song in the world.

“That’s not one of my songs, hon,” Aretha says, dryly, like there’s a big piece of bread stuck in her throat.

My teacher and I look at each other because we can’t believe what we just heard. When did Aretha get particular about singing other people’s songs? When did she stop being the Queen of all things lyrical? Our eyes tell each other to just let it go.

“I’ll sing it,” Missy Elliott says. “Missy be putting down on some church songs, chicky.”

I don’t know why, but I believe her and I’m all for having her try, but my grandmother and my mother, in unison, with emphasis, say, “No singing at the table.”

I sit down in my seat at the opposite end from Jesus and wait. I see my grandmother talking to the woman I’ve just brought from the kitchen. Suddenly, the woman’s face lights up. I swear, it’s like she has turned ten shades brighter. Like Jesus has touched her and all her troubles have suddenly rolled away. She even begins to resemble someone I should know.

“Oh, Lord, Jesus, you done shown mercy on me.” It’s all she can say, as she looks over at Jesus. I know she wants to go to him and perhaps kiss his feet or bring him a glass of water—anything she could do to show her love for him. I see tears forming in her rich brown eyes, and I think that Zora could have created this woman in one of her novels. She is Phoebe perhaps, or Janie’s grandmother, only before she got so old and gave out.

“Go on,” my own grandmother says to the woman. “Take your seat at the table.”

The woman walks slowly past Zora, Mrs. King, my mother, and Alice. When she arrives at the empty chair, she says, “This’ll be the first time I been to a meeting inside a real house.”

Instinctively, I know she means it’s the first time she’s been asked to come out of the kitchen and eat. Part of me wants to cry, too, because I’m all soft and warmhearted like that, but also because I know exactly how the woman feels. This is the first time I’ve been allowed to eat with the likes of these magnificent women, especially since my grandmother and my mother and my teacher and my aunt passed on over.

They just don’t make people like them anymore. That’s when it hits me that I am the special guest, that these aren't people my grandmother would likely meet up with in heaven. These are people brought here for me. And then, I surely want to cry. I want to lie down on the floor and bawl like a baby, only there'd be no kicking and screaming, just calm, dedicated tears rolling off my happy face and onto the well-worn floor. Where do we go from here? I ask myself.

Zora says, “Who's going to wrassle us up something to eat? Y’all know I like to cook; just don’t expect me to keep a tidy kitchen.”

“I’ll do it,” my mother says. And no one dislikes the idea because they all know she can throw down on some vittles. Even my aunt doesn’t object.

But Jesus stops them all. “Have you so little faith?” he asks. “I fed thousands with two fish and five loaves of bread. Haven’t we more than that here on the table.”

We all take a look, and sure enough, there are apples and pears and jam and butter and another loaf of bread and some kind of cheese that’s been hardly touched. But just to make sure, we look at Aretha and wait for her agreement.

“Don't look at me,” she almost sings, her round cheeks next to bubbling. “Ree knows how to make do.”

“I believe you do,” Mrs. King says. I’m surprised at her tone because it’s almost flippant, like she might still be questioning the friendship Aretha and her husband had so many years ago.

My teacher, perhaps from years of knowing how to break up a clash of characters, turns the attention back to Jesus. “Teacher,” she calls him,

“I was wondering what message you'd like to leave with us before you go.”

He’s going? We haven't even eaten yet.

“The greatest of the commandments never changes,” he says. “Love God, our father, above all, and then love your neighbor as you love yourself.”

“Amen,” Oprah says. “That’s the message I try to put out every day. It’s my ministry. I believe that if we can all just learn to take care of one another, this world will be a better place. Don’t you?”

“Yes, Ma'am,” my aunt says. “Satan will surely test you.”

“Yes, Mrs. Sherry, you’re right,” Oprah returns, but before she can carry on with this little sanctified discussion with my aunt, my mother stands up and clicks her spoon on her water glass.

“Excuse me,” she says. “You all have been wonderful to come here today and spend this time with my daughter.” And looking at Jesus, “The Lord knows, I thank you.”

Jesus nods his head. Everyone else clears their throats and says things like, “Oh, that’s alright. We're glad to do it” and “Don’t mention it, none” and “No, no, thank you for having us.” And as they say these things, they look at my mother and then they look at me, as if to say, “Yes, we mean you, too.”

My mother continues her speech, and for some reason I think she’s about to start off on a tremendously long monologue. This can’t be true, though, because Jesus is pulling out his chair, preparing to stand. “The Lord is my Shepherd; I shall not want,” my mother begins. And Jesus sits back in his seat.

My mother continues: “Those was words my mother always told me to say whenever I was in trouble or when I was about to take a trip or even for good times when things was good. And when I got married and had chirren of my own, I told them to repeat the 23"? Psalm.” Then she looks at me. “No matter how bad things get, you can always count on the Lord.”

“I do,” I say. I can’t help but break in. “I do, Momma. I do.”

“Then I did my job right,” she says.

By the time she says these last words, she and I both have tears streaming down our faces. I am that child again, wanting to run into her arms and find sweet solace. And that’s when I know it’s just a dream, that if I walk over to her standing there, only her spirit will be waiting, and that part of her I cannot touch, at least not physically, so that I can feel it, wrap myself in it.

She and my grandmother give each other a hug then, as though they have just met each other after a long, difficult absence. They are so glad to be with each other. My mother’s stout self wraps her arms around my grandmother's frail frame, and in my heart I want my mother to remain there where I know she’ll be happy.

Jesus says, “Surely, I am with you always, even till the end of all ages. Now, I must surely go.” To me specifically, he says, “Take everything you have and use it. Remember that all things are possible.”

That’s when my eye catches the true knowledge of the woman sitting next to me, this woman whom I have brought from the kitchen to eat this special dinner with us. She is my friend, Glenda, from so many years ago. She has reportedly lived a miserable life, touched specifically by the cruelties of life after she caught a terrible disease. Only a few years before, I had learned that she'd died, almost unrecognizable to those who’d known her. She had been poor and had chosen to take a seat at the back of every table in life, never wanting to be a hindrance to anyone. Somehow, in my long journeys, I had forgotten her and had carried on with my life without looking back to search for her. Seeing her there now, at this table with me, even in my dreams, I know I’ve been given that chance to say goodbye.

“No need,” she says to me. “Don’t worry about it. The cobbler’s in the oven.”

With that, Jesus rises and goes from the room, saying, “Peace be with you.”

Does it suddenly feel like Christmas to anyone else?

I would like to say that when Jesus left, all the women continued to behave themselves, but you see Zora was there and she said, “All right, yall, let’s spread some jenk and have a good time.”

And even my Aunt Sherry liked that idea. Suddenly, there were Chippendales in their tights and bowties bringing out bowls and bowls of cobbler and bottles of Cristal; no, I mean Brut champagne.

“Break me off,” Missy Elliott said, flashing her gold, and I knew she liked this idea. Pretty soon, my grandmother’s house wasn’t a sad and lonely place at all.

0 notes

fromprison2002 · 5 months

Text

Ana María Shua --- It's All Relative

It’s all relative. On my planet I won beauty contests, I was the equivalent of the earth’s Miss Universe. Here I’m a circus freak, says the sad female from Alpha Centauri, shaking out her vibrating appendages. All in all, who can say she’s lying?

0 notes

fromprison2002 · 5 months

Text

Flash fiction

REVENGE

Ludmilla Petrushevskaya

THERE ONCE LIVED A WOMAN WHO HATED HER NEIGHBOR—A single mother with a small child. As the child grew and learned to crawl, the woman would sometimes leave a pot of boiling water in the corridor, or a container full of bleach, or she’d just spread out a whole box of needles right there in the hall. The poor mother didn’t suspect anything—her little girl hadn’t learned to walk yet, and she didn’t let her out in the corridor during the winter when the floor was cold. But the time was fast approaching when her daughter would be able to leave the room on her own. The mother would say to her neighbor, “Raya, sweetie, you dropped your needles again,” at which point Raya would blame her poor memory. “I’m always forgetting things,” she’d say.

They’d once been friends. Two unmarried women living in a communal apartment, they had a lot in common. They even shared friends who came by, and on their birthdays they gave each other gifts. They told each other everything. But then Zina became pregnant, and Raya found herself consumed with hatred. She couldn’t bear to be in the same apartment as the pregnant woman and began to come home late at night. She couldn’t sleep because she kept hearing a man’s voice coming from Zina’s room; she imagined she heard them talking and moving about, when in fact Zina was living there all by herself.

Zina, on the other hand, grew more and more attached to Raya. She even told her once how wonderful it was to have a neighbor like her, practically an older sister, who would never abandon her in a time of need.

And Raya did in fact help her friend sew clothes in anticipation of the newborn, and she drove Zina to the hospital when the time came. But she didn’t come to pick her up after the birth, so that Zina had to stay in the hospital an extra day and ended up taking the baby home wrapped in a ragged hospital blanket that she promised to return right away. Raya explained that she hadn’t been feeling well. In the weeks that followed she didn’t once go to the store for Zina, or help her bathe the baby, but just sat in her room with warm compresses over her shoulders. She wouldn’t even look at the baby, though Zina often took the girl to the bath or the kitchen or just out for a little walk, and kept the door to her room open all the time, as if to say: Come look.

Before the baby came, Zina learned how to use the sewing machine and began to work from home. She had no family to help her, and as for her once-kind neighbor, well, deep down Zina knew she couldn’t count on anyone but herself—it had been her idea to have a child, and now she had to bear the burden. When the girl was very little, Zina could take finished clothes to the shop while the baby slept, but when the baby got a little bigger and slept less, Zina’s problems began: she had to take the girl with her. Raya continued to complain about her bad joints, and even took time off from work, but Zina wouldn’t dare ask her to babysit.

2 notes · View notes

fromprison2002 · 5 months

Text

Short story

Ludmilla Petrushevskaya

The Arm

DURING THE WAR, A COLONEL RECEIVED A LETTER FROM HIS wife. She misses him very much, it said, and won’t he come visit because she’s worried she’ll die without having seen him. The colonel applied for leave right away, and as it happened that just a few days earlier he’d been awarded a medal, he was granted three days. He got a plane home, but just an hour before his arrival his wife died. He wept, buried his wife, and got on a train back to his base—and then suddenly discovered he had lost his Party card. He dug through all his things, returned to the train station—all this with great difficulty—but couldn’t find it. Finally he just went home. There he fell asleep and dreamed that he saw his wife, who said that his Party card was in her coffin—it had fallen out when the colonel bent over to kiss her during the funeral. In his dream his wife also told the colonel not to lift the veil from her face.

The colonel did as he was told: he dug up the coffin, opened it, and found his Party card inside. But then he couldn’t resist: he lifted the covering from his wife’s face. She lay there as if still alive, but there was a little worm on her left cheek. The colonel wiped away the worm with his hand, covered up his wife’s face, and reburied the coffin.

Now he had very little time, and he went directly to the airfield. The plane he needed wasn’t there, but then a pilot in a charred jacket pulled him aside and said he was flying to the same place as the colonel and could drop him off. The colonel was surprised that the pilot knew where he was going, but then he saw it was the same pilot who had flown him home.

“Are you all right?” asked the colonel.

“I had a little crash on the way back,” said the pilot, “but it’s all right. I’ll drop you off, it’s on the way.”

They flew at night. The colonel sat on a metal bench running the length of the plane. In truth he was surprised the plane could fly at all. It was in terrible shape: clumps of material hung everywhere, some kind of charred stump kept rolling into the colonel’s feet, and there was a strong odor of burned flesh. They soon landed, and the colonel asked the pilot if he was sure this was the right place. The pilot said he was absolutely sure.

“Why is your plane in such poor shape?” the colonel demanded, and the pilot explained that his navigator usually cleaned up, but he’d just been killed. And right away he started lugging the charred stump off the plane, saying, “There he is, my navigator.”

The plane stood in a field, and all through this field wandered wounded men. There was forest in every direction, a campfire burned in the distance, and among the burned-out cars and artillery, people were lying and sitting, others were standing, and others were milling about.

“Damn it!” the colonel yelled. “Where have you brought me? This isn’t my base!”

“This is your base now,” said the pilot. “I’ve brought you back to where I picked you up.”

The colonel understood that his division had been surrounded and destroyed, everyone killed or wounded, and he cursed everything on earth, including the pilot, who was still messing with his charred stump, which he insisted on calling his navigator, and pleading with it to get up and go.

“Let’s start evacuating everyone,” ordered the colonel. “We’ll begin with the military files, then the coats of arms and the heavily wounded.”

“This plane won’t fly anymore,” the pilot noted.

The colonel drew his pistol and promised to shoot the pilot then and there for disobeying an order. But the pilot ignored him and went on trying to stand the stump on the ground, first one way, then another, saying over and over, “Come on, let’s go.”

The colonel fired his pistol, but he must have missed because the pilot kept mumbling, “Come on, come on,” to his navigator, and in the meantime the roar of vehicles could be heard, and suddenly the field was filled with a mechanized column of German infantry.

The colonel took cover in the grass as the trucks kept coming and coming, but there was neither shooting nor shouting of orders, nor did the motors stop running. Ten minutes later the column was gone, and the colonel raised his head—the pilot was still fussing with his charred stump, and over by the fire people were still lying down, sitting, walking around. The colonel stood and approached the fire. He didn’t recognize anyone—this wasn’t his division at all. There was infantry here, and artillery, and God knows what else, all in torn uniforms, with open wounds on their arms, legs, stomachs. Only their faces were clean. They talked quietly among themselves. Next to the fire, her back to the colonel, sat a woman in civilian dress with a kerchief on her head.

“Who’s the senior officer here?” demanded the colonel. “I need an immediate report on the situation.”

No one moved, and no one paid any attention to the colonel when he started shooting, although when the pilot finally managed to roll his charred stump over to them, everyone helped him throw his navigator on the flames and thereby put out the fire. It became completely dark.

The colonel was shivering from the cold and began cursing again: now it would be impossible to get warm, he said—you can’t light a fire with a log like that.

And without turning around, the woman by the fire said: “Oh why did you look at my face, why did you lift my veil? Now your arm is going to wither.”

It was the voice of the colonel’s wife.

The colonel lost consciousness, and when next he woke up he was in a hospital. He was told that they’d found him in the cemetery, next to his wife’s grave, and that the arm on which he’d been lying was seriously injured, and now might have to be removed

0 notes

fromprison2002 · 5 months

Text

Short story

Stuart Dybek: Hot Ice

Saints

The saint, a virgin, was uncorrupted. She had been frozen in a block of ice many years ago.

Her father had found her half-naked body floating facedown among water lilies, her blond hair fanning at the marshy edge of the overgrown duck pond people still referred to as the Douglas Park Lagoon.

That’s how Eddie Kapusta had heard it.

Douglas Park was a black park now, the lagoon curdled in milky green scum as if it had soured, and Kapusta didn’t doubt that were he to go there they’d find his body floating in the lily pads too. But sometimes in winter, riding by on the California Avenue bus, the park flocked white, deserted, and the lagoon frozen over, Eddie could almost picture what it had been back then: swans gliding around the small, wooded island at the center, and rowboats plying into sunlight from the gaping stone tunnels of the haunted-looking boathouse.

The girl had gone rowing with a couple of guys — some said they were sailors, neighborhood kids going off to the war — nobody ever said who exactly or why she went with them, as if it didn’t matter. They rowed her around to the blind side of the little island. Nobody knew what happened there either. It was necessary for each person to imagine it for himself.

They were only joking at first was how Kapusta imagined it, laughing at her broken English, telling her to be friendly or swim home. One of them stroked her hair, gently undid her bun, and as her hair fell cascading over her shoulders surprising them all, the other reached too suddenly for the buttons on her blouse; she tore away so hard the boat rocked violently, her slip and bra split, breasts sprung loose, she dove.

Even the suddenness was slow motion the way Kapusta imagined it. But once they were in the water the rest went through his mind in a flash — the boat capsizing, the sailors thrashing for the little island, and the girl struggling alone in that sepia water too warm from summer, just barely deep enough for bullheads, with a mud bottom kids said was quicksand exploding into darkness with each kick. He didn’t want to wonder what she remembered as she held her last breath underwater. His mind raced over that to her father wading out into cattails, scooping her half-naked and still limp from the resisting water lilies, and running with her in his arms across the park crying in Polish or Slovak or Bohemian, whatever they were, and then riding with her on the streetcar he wouldn’t let stop until it reached the icehouse he owned, where crazy with grief he sealed her in ice.

“I believe it up to the part about the streetcar,” Manny Santora said that summer when they told each other such stories, talking often about things Manny called weirdness while pitching quarters in front of Buddy’s Bar. “I don’t believe he hijacked no streetcar, man.”

“What you think, man, he called a cab?” Pancho, Manny’s older brother, asked, winking at Eddie as if he’d scored.

Every time they talked like this Manny and Pancho argued. Pancho believed in everything — ghosts, astrology, legends. His nickname was Padrecito, which went back to his days as an altar boy when he would dress up as a priest and hold mass in the backyard with hosts punched with bottle caps from stale tortillas and real wine he’d collected from bottles the winos had left on door stoops. Eddie’s nickname was Eduardo, though the only person who called him that was Manny, who had made it up. Manny wasn’t the kind of guy to have a nickname — he was Manny or Santora.

Pancho believed if you played certain rock songs backward you’d hear secret messages from the devil. He believed in devils and angels. He still believed he had a guardian angel. It was something like being lucky, like making the sign of the cross before you stepped into the batter’s box. “It’s why I don’t get caught even when I’m caught,” he’d say when the cops would catch him dealing and not take him in. Pancho believed in saints. For a while he had even belonged to a gang called the Saints. They’d tried to recruit Manny too, who, though younger, was tougher than Pancho, but Manny had no use for gangs. “I already belong to the Loners,” he said.

Pancho believed in the girl in ice. In sixth grade, Sister Joachim, the ancient nun in charge of the altar boys, had told him the girl should be canonized and that she’d secretly written to the pope informing him that already there had been miracles and cures. “All the martyrs didn’t die in Rome,” she’d told Pancho. “They’re still suffering today in China and Russia and Korea and even here in your own neighborhood.” Like all nuns she loved Pancho. Dressed in his surplice and cassock he looked as if he should be beatified himself, a young St. Sebastian or Juan de la Cruz, the only altar boy in the history of the parish to spend his money on different-colored gym shoes so they would match the priest’s vestments — red for martyrs, white for feast days, black for requiems. The nuns knew he punished himself during Lent, offering up his pain for the poor souls in purgatory.

Their love for Pancho had made things impossible for Manny in the Catholic school. He seemed Pancho’s opposite in almost every way and dropped out after they’d held him back in sixth grade. He switched to public school, but mostly he hung out on the streets.

“I believe she worked miracles right in this neighborhood, man,” Pancho said.

“Bullshit, man. Like what miracles?” Manny wanted to know.

“Okay, man, you know Big Antek,” Pancho said.

“Big Antek the wino?”

They all knew Big Antek. He bought them beer. He’d been a butcher in every meat market in the neighborhood, but drunkenly kept hacking off pieces of his hands, and finally quit completely to become a full-time alky.

Big Antek had told Pancho about working on Kedzie Avenue when it was still mostly people from the old country and he had found a job at a Czech meat market with sawdust on the floor and skinned rabbits in the window. He wasn’t there a week when he got so drunk he passed out in the freezer and when he woke the door was locked and everyone was gone. It was Saturday and he knew they wouldn’t open again until Monday and by then he’d be stiff as a two-by-four. He was already shivering so badly he couldn’t stand still or he’d fall over. He figured he’d be dead already except that his blood was half alcohol. Parts of him were going numb and he started staggering around, bumping past hanging sides of meat, singing, praying out loud, trying to let the fear out before it became panic. He knew it was hopeless, but he was looking anyway for some place to smash out, some plug to pull, something to stop the cold. At the back of the freezer, behind racks of meat, he found a cooler. It was an old one, the kind that used to stand packed with blocks of ice and bottles of beer in taverns during the war. And seeing it, Big Antek suddenly remembered a moment from his first summer back from the Pacific, discharged from the hospital in Manila and back in Buddy’s lounge on Twenty-fourth Street, kitty-corner from a victory garden where a plaque erroneously listed his name among the parish war dead. It was an ordinary moment, nothing dramatic like his life flashing before his eyes, but the memory filled him with such clarity that the freezer became dreamlike beside it. The ball game was on the radio over at Buddy’s, DiMaggio in center again, while Bing Crosby crooned from the jukebox, which was playing at the same time. Antek was reaching into Buddy’s cooler, up to his elbow in ice water feeling for a beer, while looking out through the open tavern door that framed Twenty-fourth Street as if it were a movie full of girls blurred in brightness, slightly overexposed blondes, a movie he could step into any time he chose now that he was home; but right at this moment he was taking his time, stretching it out until it encompassed his entire life, the cold bottles bobbing away from his fingertips, clunking against the ice, until finally he grabbed one, hauled it up dripping, wondering what he’d grabbed — a Monarch or Yusay Pilsner or Fox Head 400—then popped the cork in the opener on the side of the cooler, the foam rising as he tilted his head back and let it pour down his throat, privately celebrating being alive. That moment was what drinking had once been about. It was a good thing to be remembering now when he was dying with nothing else to do about it. He had the funny idea of climbing inside the cooler and going to sleep to continue the memory like a dream. The cooler was thick with frost, so white it seemed to glow. Its lid had been replaced with a slab of dry ice that smoked even within the cold of the freezer, reminding Antek that as kids they’d always called it hot ice. He nudged it aside. Beneath it was a block of ice as clear as if the icemen had just delivered it. There was something frozen inside. He glanced away but knew already, immediately, it was a body. He couldn’t move away. He looked again. The longer he stared, the calmer he felt. It was a girl. He could make out her hair, not just blonde but radiating gold like a candle flame behind a window in winter. Her breasts were bare. The ice seemed even clearer. She was beautiful and dreamy looking, not dreamy like sleeping, but the dreamy look DPs sometimes get when they first come to the city. As long as he stayed beside her he didn’t shiver. He could feel the blood return; he was warm as if the smoldering dry ice really was hot. He spent the weekend huddled against her, and early Monday morning when the Czech opened the freezer he said to Antek, “Get out…you’re fired.” That’s all either one of them said.

“You know what I think,” Pancho said. “They moved her body from the icehouse to the butcher shop because the cops checked, man.”

“You know what I think,” Manny said, “I think you’re doing so much shit that even the winos can bullshit you.”

They looked hard at one another, Manny especially looking bad because of a beard he was trying to grow that was mostly stubble except for a black knot of hair frizzing from the cleft under his lower lip — a little lip beard like a jazz musician’s — and Pancho covered in crosses, a wooden one dangling from a leather thong over his open shirt, and small gold cross on a fine gold chain tight about his throat, and a tiny platinum cross in his right earlobe, and a faded India-ink cross tattooed on his wrist where one would feel for a pulse.

“He got a cross-shaped dick,” Manny said.

“Only when I got a hard-on, man,” Pancho said, grinning, and they busted up.

“Hey, Eddie, man,” Pancho said, “what you think of all this, man?”

Kapusta just shrugged as he always did. Not that he didn’t have any ideas exactly, or that he didn’t care. That shrug was what Kapusta believed.

“Yeah. Well, man,” Pancho said, “I believe there’s saints, and miracles happening everywhere only everybody’s afraid to admit it. I mean like Ralph’s little brother, the blue baby who died when he was eight. He knew he was dying all his life, man, and never complained. He was a saint. Or Big Antek who everybody says is a wino, man. But he treats everybody as human beings. Who you think’s more of a saint — him or the president, man? And Mrs. Corillo who everybody thought was crazy because she was praying loud all the time. Remember? She kneeled all day praying for Puerto Rico during that earthquake — the one Roberto Clemente crashed on the way to, going to help. Remember that, man? Mrs. Corillo prayed all day and they thought she was still praying at night and she was kneeling there dead. She was a saint, man, and so’s Roberto Clemente. There should be like a church, St. Roberto Clemente. With a statue of him in his batting stance by the altar. Kids could pray to him at night. That would mean something to them.”

“The earthquake wasn’t in Puerto Rico, man,” Manny told him, “and I don’t believe no streetcar’d stop for somebody carrying a dead person.”

Amnesia

It was hard to believe there ever were streetcars. The city back then, the city of their fathers, which was as far back as a family memory extended, even the city of their childhoods, seemed as remote to Eddie and Manny as the capital of some foreign country.

The past collapsed about them — decayed, bulldozed, obliterated. They walked past block-length gutted factories, past walls of peeling, multicolored doors hammered up around flooded excavation pits, hung out in half-boarded storefronts of groceries that had shut down when they were kids, dusty cans still stacked on the shelves. Broken glass collected everywhere, mounding like sand in the little, sunken front yards and gutters. Even the church’s stained-glass windows were patched with plywood.

They could vaguely remember something different before the cranes and wrecking balls gradually moved in, not order exactly, but rhythms: five-o’clock whistles, air-raid sirens on Tuesdays, Thursdays when the stockyards blew over like a brown wind of boiling hooves and bone, at least that’s what people said, screwing up their faces: “Phew! They’re making glue today!”

Streetcar tracks were long paved over; black webs of trolley wires vanished. So did the victory gardens that had become weed beds taking the corroded plaques with the names of neighborhood dead with them.

Things were gone they couldn’t remember but missed; and things were gone they weren’t sure ever were there — the pickle factory by the railroad tracks where a DP with a net worked scooping rats out of the open vats, troughs for ragmen’s horses, ragmen and their wooden wagons, knife sharpeners pushing screeching whetstones up alleys hollering “Scissors! Knives!” hermits living in cardboard shacks behind billboards.

At times, walking past the gaps, they felt as if they were no longer quite there themselves, half-lost despite familiar street signs, shadows of themselves superimposed on the present, except there was no present — everything either rubbled past or promised future — and they were walking as if floating, getting nowhere as if they’d smoked too much grass.

That’s how it felt those windy nights that fall when Manny and Eddie circled the county jail. They’d float down California past the courthouse, Bridwell Correctional, the auto pound, Communicable Disease Hospital, and then follow the long, curving concrete wall of the prison back toward Twenty-sixth Street, sharing a joint, passing it with cupped hands, ready to flip it if a cop should cruise by, but one place you could count on not to see cops was outside the prison.

Nobody was there; just the wall, railroad tracks, the river, and the factories that lined it — boundaries that remained intact while neighborhoods came and went.

Eddie had never noticed any trees, but swirls of leaves scuffed past their shoes. It was Kapusta’s favorite weather, wild, blowing nights that made him feel free, flagpoles knocking in the wind, his clothes flapping like flags. He felt both tight and loose, and totally alive even walking down a street that always made him sad. It was the street that followed the curve of the prison wall, and it didn’t have a name. It was hardly a street at all, more a shadow of the wall, potholed, puddled, half-paved, rutted with rusted railroad tracks.

“Trains used to go down this street.” Manny said.

“I seen tanks going down this street.”

“Tank cars?”

“No, army tanks,” Kapusta said.

“Battleships too, Eduardo?” Manny asked seriously. Then the wind ripped a laugh from his mouth that was loud enough to carry over the prison wall.

Kapusta laughed loud too. But he could remember tanks, camouflaged with netting, rumbling on flatcars, their cannons outlined by the red lanterns of the dinging crossing gates that were down all along Twenty-sixth Street. It was one of the first things he remembered. He must have been very small. The train seemed endless. He could see the guards in the turrets on the prison wall watching it, the only time he’d ever seen them facing the street. “Still sending them to Korea or someplace,” his father had said, and for years after Eddie believed you could get to Korea by train. For years after, he would wake in the middle of the night when it was quiet enough to hear the trains passing blocks away, and lie in bed listening, wondering if the tanks were rumbling past the prison, if not to Korea then to some other war that tanks went to at night; and he would think of the prisoners in their cells locked up for their violence with knives and clubs and cleavers and pistols, and wonder if they were lying awake, listening too as the netted cannons rolled by their barred windows. Even as a child Eddie knew the names of men inside there: Milo Hermanski, who had stabbed some guy in the eye in a fight at Andy’s Tap; Billy Gomez, who set the housing project on fire every time his sister Gina got gang-banged; Ziggy’s uncle, the war hero, who one day blew off the side of Ziggy’s mother’s face while she stood ironing her slip during an argument over a will; and other names of people he didn’t know but had heard about — Benny Bedwell, with his “Elvis” sideburns, who may have killed the Grimes sister; Mafia hit men; bank robbers; junkies; perverts; murderers on death row — he could sense them lying awake listening, could feel the tension of their sleeplessness, and Pancho lay among them now as Eddie and Manny walked outside the wall.

They stopped again as they’d been stopping and yelled together: “Pancho, Panchooooooo,” dragging out the last vowel the way they had as kids standing on the sidewalk calling up at one another’s windows, as if knocking at the door were not allowed.

“Pancho, we’re out here, brother, me and Eddie,” Manny shouted. “Hang tough, man, we ain’t forgetting you.”

Nobody answered. They kept walking, stopping to shout at intervals the way they had been doing almost every night.

“If only we knew what building he was in,” Eddie said.

They could see the upper stories of the brick buildings rising over the wall, their grated windows low lit, never dark, floodlights on the roof glaring down.

“Looks like a factory, man,” Eddie said. “Looks like the same guy who planned the Harvester foundry on Western did the jail.”

“You rather be in the army or in there?” Manny asked.

“No way they’re getting me in there,” Eddie said.

That was when Eddie knew Pancho was crazy, when the judge had given Pancho a choice at the end of his trial.

“You’re a nice-looking kid,” the judge had said, “too nice for prison. What do you want to do with your life?”

“Pose for holy cards,” Pancho said, “St. Joseph is my specialty.” Pancho was standing there wearing the tie they had brought him wound around his head like an Indian headband. He was wearing a black satin jacket with the signs of the zodiac on the back.

“I’m going to give you a chance to straighten out, to gain some self-respect. The court’s attitude would be very sympathetic to any signs of self-direction and patriotism, joining the army, for instance.”

“I’m a captain,” Pancho told him.

“The army or jail, which is it?”

“I’m a captain, man, soy capitán, capitán,” Pancho insisted, humming “La Bamba” under his breath.

“You’re a misfit.”

Manny was able to visit Pancho every three weeks. Each time it got worse. Sometimes Pancho seemed hardly to recognize him, looking away, refusing to meet Manny’s eyes the whole visit. Sometimes he’d cry. For a while at first he wanted to know how things were in the neighborhood. Then he stopped asking, and when Manny tried to tell him the news Pancho would get jumpy, irritable, and lapse into total silence. “I don’t wanna talk about out there, man,” he told Manny. “I don’t wanna remember that world until I’m ready to step into it again. You remember too much in here you go crazy, man. I wanna forget everything, like I never existed.”

“His fingernails are gone, man,” Manny told Eddie. “He’s gnawing on himself like a rat, and when I ask him what’s going down all he’ll say is ‘I’m locked in hell, my angel’s gone, I’ve lost my luck’—bullshit like that, you know? Last time I seen him he says, ‘I’m gonna kill myself, man, if they don’t stop hitting on me.’”

“I can’t fucking believe it. I can’t fucking believe he’s in there,” Eddie said. “He should be in a monastery somewhere; he should’ve been a priest. He had a vocation.”

“He had a vocation to be an altar boy, man,” Manny said, spitting it out as if he was disgusted by what he was saying, talking down about his own brother. “It was that nuns-and-priests crap that messed up his head. He was happy being an altar boy, man, if they’d’ve let him be an altar boy all his life he’d still be happy.”

By the time they were halfway down the nameless street it was drizzling a fine, misty spray, and Manny was yelling in Spanish, “Estamos contigo, hermano! San Roberto Clemente te ayudará!”

They broke into “La Bamba,” Eddie singing in Spanish too, not sure exactly what he was singing, but it sounded good: “Yo no soy marinero, soy capitán, capitán, ay, ay Bamba! ay, ay, Bamba!” He had lived beside Spanish in the neighborhood all his life, and every so often a word got through, like juilota, which was what Manny called pigeons when they used to hunt them with slingshots under the railroad bridges. It seemed a perfect word to Eddie, one in which he could hear both their cooing and the whistling rush of their wings. He didn’t remember any words like that in Polish, which his grandma had spoken to him when he was little, and which, Eddie had been told, he could once speak too.

By midnight they were at the end of their circuit, emerging from the unlighted, nameless street, stepping over tracks that continued to curve past blinded switches. Under the streetlights on Twenty-sixth the prison wall appeared rust stained, oozing at the cracks. The wire spooled at the top of the wall looked rusty in the wet light, as did the tracks as if the rain were rusting everything overnight.

They stopped on the corner of Twenty-sixth where the old icehouse stood across the nameless street from the prison. One could still buy ice from a vending machine in front. Without realizing it, Eddie guarded his breathing as if still able to detect the faintest stab of ammonia, although it had been a dozen years since the louvered fans on the icehouse roof had clacked through clouds of vapor.

“Padrecitooooo!” they both hollered.

Their voices bounced back off the wall.

They stood on the corner by the icehouse as if waiting around for someone. From there they could stare down Twenty-sixth — five dark blocks, then an explosion of neon at Kedzie Avenue: taco places, bars, a street plugged in, winking festive as a pinball machine, traffic from it coming toward them in the rain.

The streetlights surged and flickered.

“You see that?” Eddie asked. “They used to say when the streetlights flickered it meant they just fried somebody in the electric chair.”

“So much bullshit,” Manny said. “Compadre, no te rajes!” he yelled at the wall.

“Whatcha tell him?”

“It sounds different in English,” Manny said. “‘Godfather, do not give up.’ It’s words from an old song.”

Kapusta stepped out into the middle of Twenty-sixth and stood in the misting drizzle squinting at Kedzie through cupped hands, as if he held binoculars. He could make out the traffic light way down there changing to green. He could almost hear the music from the bars that would serve them without asking for IDs so long as Manny was there. “You thirsty by any chance, man?” he asked.

“You buyin’ by any chance, man?” Manny said, grinning.

“Buenas noches, Pancho,” they hollered. “Catch you tomorrow, man.”

“Good night, guys,” a falsetto voice echoed back from over the wall.

“That ain’t Pancho,” Manny said.

“Sounds like the singer on old Platters’ records,” Eddie said. “Ask him if he knows Pancho, man.”

“Hey, you know a guy named Pancho Santora?” Manny called.

“Oh, Pancho?” the voice inquired.

“Yeah, Pancho.”

“Oh, Cisco!” the voice shouted. They could hear him cackling. “Hey, baby, I don’t know no Pancho. Is that rain I smell?”

“It’s raining,” Eddie hollered.

“Hey, baby, tell me something. What’s it like out there tonight?”

Manny and Eddie looked at each other. “Beautiful!” they yelled together.

Grief

There was never a requiem, but by Lent everyone knew that one way or another Pancho was gone. No wreaths, but plenty of rumors: Pancho had hung himself in his cell; his throat had been slashed in the showers; he’d killed another inmate and was under heavy sedation in a psycho ward at Kankakee. And there was talk he’d made a deal and was in the army, shipped off to a war he had sworn he’d never fight; that he had turned snitch and had been secretly relocated with a new identity; or that he had become a trustee and had simply walked away while mowing the grass in front of the courthouse, escaped maybe to Mexico, or maybe just across town to the North Side around Diversey where, if one made the rounds of the leather bars, they might see someone with Pancho’s altar-boy eyes staring out from the makeup of a girl.

Some saw him late at night like a ghost haunting the neighborhood, collar up, in the back of the church lighting a vigil candle; or veiled in a black mantilla, speeding past, face floating by on a greasy El window.

Rumors were becoming legends, but there was never a wake, never an obituary, and no one knew how to mourn a person who had just disappeared.

For a while Manny disappeared too. He wasn’t talking, and Kapusta didn’t ask. They had quit walking around the prison wall months before, around Christmas when Pancho refused to let anyone, even Manny, visit. But their night walks had been tapering off before that.

Eddie remembered the very last time they had walked beside the wall together. It was in December, and he was frozen from standing around a burning garbage can on Kedzie, selling Christmas trees. About ten, when the lot closed, Manny came by and they stopped to thaw out at the Carta Blanca. A guy named José kept buying them whiskeys, and they staggered out after midnight into a blizzard.

“Look at this white bullshit,” Manny said.

Walking down Twenty-sixth they stopped to fling snowballs over the wall. Then they decided to stand there singing Christmas carols. Snow was drifting against the wall, erasing the street that had hardly been there. Eddie could tell Manny was starting to go silent. Manny would get the first few words into a carol, singing at the top of his voice, then stop as if choked by the song. His eyes stayed angry when he laughed. Everything was bullshit to him, and finally Eddie couldn’t talk to him anymore. Stomping away from the prison through fresh snow, Eddie had said, “If this keeps up, man, I’ll need boots.”

“It don’t have to keep up, man,” Manny snapped. “Nobody’s making you come, man. It ain’t your brother.”

“All I said is I’ll need boots, man,” Eddie said.

“You said it hopeless, man; things are always fucking hopeless to you.”

“Hey, you’re the big realist, man,” Eddie told him.

“I never said I was no realist,” Manny mumbled.

Kapusta hadn’t had a lot of time since then. He had dropped out of school again and was loading trucks at night for UPS. One more semester didn’t matter, he figured, and he needed some new clothes, cowboy boots, a green leather jacket. The weather had turned drizzly and mild — a late Easter but an early spring. Eddie had heard Manny was hanging around by himself, still finding bullshit everywhere, only worse. Now he muttered as he walked like some crazy, bitter old man, or one of those black guys reciting the gospel to buildings, telling off posters and billboards, neon signs, stoplights, passing traffic — bullshit, all of it bullshit.

It was Tuesday in Holy Week, the statues inside the church shrouded in violet, when Eddie slipped on his green leather jacket and walked over to Manny’s before going to work. He rang the doorbell, then stepped outside in the rain and stood on the sidewalk under Manny’s windows, watching cars pass.

After a while Manny came down the stairs and slammed out the door.

“How you doin’, man?” Eddie said as if they’d just run into each other by accident.

Manny stared at him. “How far’d you have to chase him for that jacket, man?” he said.

“I knew you’d dig it.” Eddie smiled.

They went out for a few beers later that night, after midnight, when Eddie was through working, but instead of going to a bar they ended up just walking. Manny had rolled a couple bombers and they walked down the boulevard along California watching the headlights flash by like a procession of candles. Manny still wasn’t saying much, but they were passing the reefer like having a conversation. At Thirty-first, by the Communicable Disease Hospital, Eddie figured they would follow the curve of the boulevard toward the bridge on Western, but Manny turned as if out of habit toward the prison.

They were back walking along the wall. There was still old ice from winter at the base of it.

“The only street in Chicago where it��s still winter,” Eddie mumbled.

“Remember yelling?” Manny said, almost in a whisper.

“Sure,” Eddie nodded.

“Called, joked, prayed, sang Christmas songs, remember that night, how cold we were, man?”

“Yeah.”

“What a bunch of stupid bullshit, huh?”

Eddie was afraid Manny was going to start the bullshit stuff again. Manny had stopped and stood looking at the wall.

Then he cupped his hands over his mouth and yelled, “Hey! You dumb fuckers in there! We’re back! Can you hear me? Hey, wake up, niggers, hey, spics, hey, honkies, you buncha fuckin’ monkeys in cages, hey! We’re out here free!”

“Hey, Manny, come on, man,” Eddie said.

Manny uncupped his hands, shook his head, and smiled. They took a few steps, then Manny whirled back again. “We’re out here free, man! We’re smokin’ reefer, drinking cold beer while you’re in there, you assholes! We’re on our way to fuck your wives, man, your girlfriends are giving us blow jobs while you jack-offs flog it. Hey, man, I’m pumping your old lady out here right now. She likes it in the ass like you!”

“What are you doing, man?” Eddie was pleading. “Take it easy.”

Manny was screaming his lungs out, almost incoherent, shouting every filthy thing he could think of, and voices, the voices they’d never heard before, had begun shouting back from the other side of the wall.

“Shadup! Shadup! Shadup out there, you crazy fuck!” came the voices.

“She’s out here licking my balls while you’re punking each other through the bars of your cage!”

“Shadup!” they were yelling, and then a voice howling over the others: “I’ll kill you, motherfucker! When I get out you’re dead!”

“Come on out,” Manny was yelling. “Come and get me, you pieces of shit, you sleazeballs, you scumbag cocksuckers, you creeps are missing it all, your lives are wasted garbage!”

Now there were too many voices to distinguish, whole tiers, whole buildings yelling and cursing and threatening, shadup, shadup, shadup, almost a chant, and then the searchlight from the guardhouse slowly turned and swept the street.

“We gotta get outa here,” Eddie said, pulling Manny away. He dragged him to the wall, right up against it where the light couldn’t follow, and they started to run, stumbling along the banked strip of filthy ice, dodging stunted trees that grew out at odd angles, running toward Twenty-sixth until Eddie heard the sirens.

“This way, man,” he panted, yanking Manny back across the nameless street, jumping puddles and tracks, cutting down a narrow corridor between abandoned truck docks seconds before a squad car, blue dome light revolving, sped past.

They jogged behind the truck docks, not stopping until they came up behind the icehouse. Manny’s panting sounded almost like laughing, the way people laugh after they’ve hurt themselves.

“I hate those motherfuckers,” Manny gasped, “all of them, the fucking cops and guards and fucking wall and the bastards behind it. All of them. That must be what makes me a realist, huh, Eddie? I fucking hate them all.”

Sometimes a thing wasn’t a sin — if there was such a thing as sin — Eddie thought, until it’s done a second time. There were accidents, mistakes that could be forgiven once; it was repeating them that made them terribly wrong. That was how Eddie felt about going back the next night.

Manny said he was going whether Eddie came or not, so Eddie went, afraid to leave Manny on his own, even though he’d already had trouble trying to get some sleep before going to work. Eddie could still hear the voices yelling from behind the wall and dreamed they were all being electrocuted, electrocuted slowly, by degrees of their crimes, screaming with each surge of current and flicker of streetlights as if in a hell where electricity had replaced fire.

Standing on the dark street Wednesday night, outside the wall again, felt like an extension of his nightmare: Manny raging almost out of control, shouting curses and insults, baiting them over the wall the way a child tortures penned watchdogs, until he had what seemed like the entire west side of the prison howling back, the guards sweeping the street with searchlights, sirens wailing toward them from both Thirty-first and Twenty-sixth.

This time they raced down the tracks that curved toward the river, picking their way in the dark along the junkyard bank, flipping rusted cables of moored barges, running through the fire truck graveyard, following the tracks across the blackened trestles where they’d once shot pigeons and from which they could gaze across the industrial prairie that stretched behind factories all the way to the skyline of downtown. The skyscrapers glowed like luminescent peaks in the misty spring night. Manny and Eddie stopped in the middle of the trestle and leaned over the railing catching their breath.

“Downtown ain’t as far away as I used to think when I was a kid.” Manny panted.

“These tracks’ll take you right there,” Eddie said quietly, “to railroad yards under the street, right by the lake.”

“How you know, man?”

“A bunch of us used to hitch rides on the boxcars in seventh grade.” Eddie was talking very quietly, looking away.

“I usually take the bus, you know?” Manny tried joking.

“I ain’t goin’ back there with you tomorrow,” Eddie said. “I ain’t goin’ back with you ever.”

Manny kept staring off toward the lights downtown as if he hadn’t heard. “Okay,” he finally said, more to himself, as if surrendering. “Okay, how about tomorrow we do something else, man?”

Nostalgia

The next night, Thursday, Eddie overslept and called in sick for work. He tried to get back to sleep but kept falling into half-dreams in which he could hear the voices shouting behind the prison wall. Finally he got up and opened a window. It was dark out. A day had passed almost unnoticed, and now the night felt as if it were a part of the night before, and the night before a part of the night before that, all connected by his restless dreams, fragments of the same continuous night.

Eddie had said that at some point: “It’s like one long night,” and later Manny had said the same thing as if it had suddenly occurred to him.

They were strung out almost from the start, drifting stoned under the El tracks before Eddie even realized they weren’t still sitting on the stairs in front of Manny’s house. That was where Eddie had found him, watching traffic, taking sips out of a bottle of Gallo into which Manny had dropped several hits of speed.

Cars gunned by with their windows rolled down and radios playing loud. It sounded like a summer night.

“Ain’t you hot wearin’ that jacket, man?” Manny asked him.

“Now that you mention it,” Eddie said. He was sweating.

Eddie took his leather jacket off and they knotted a handkerchief around one of the cuffs, then slipped the Gallo bottle down the sleeve. They walked along under the El tracks passing a joint. A train, only two cars long, rattled overhead.

“So what we doing, Eduardo?” Manny kept repeating.

“Walking,” Eddie said.

“I feel like doing something, you know?”

“We are doing something,” Eddie insisted.

Eddie led them over to the Coconut Club on Twenty-second. They couldn’t get in, but Eddie wanted to look at the window with its neon-green palm tree and winking blue coconuts.

“That’s maybe my favorite window,” he said.

“You drag me all the way here to see your favorite window, man?!” Manny said.

“It’s those blue coconuts,” Eddie tried explaining. His mouth was dry, but he couldn’t stop talking. He started telling Manny how he had collected windows from the time he was a little kid, even though talking about it made it sound as if windows were more important to him than they actually were. Half the time he was only vaguely aware of collecting them. He would see a window from a bus, like the Greek butcher shop on Halsted with its pyramid of lamb skulls, and make a mental photograph of it. He had special windows all over the city. It was how he held the city together in his mind.

“I’d see all these windows from the El,” Eddie said, “when I’d visit my busha, my grandma. Like I remember we’d pass this one building where the curtains were all slips hanging by their straps — black ones, white ones, red ones. At night you could see the light bulbs shining through the lace tops. My busha said Gypsies lived there.” Eddie was walking down the middle of the street, jacket flung over his shoulder, staring up at the windows as if looking for the Gypsies as he talked.

“Someday they’re gonna get you as a peeper, man.” Manny laughed. “And when they do, don’t try explaining to them about this thing of yours for windows, Eduardo.”

They were walking down Spaulding back toward Twenty-sixth. The streetlights beamed brighter and brighter, and Manny put his sunglasses on. A breeze was blowing that felt warmer than the air, and they took their shirts off. They saw rats darting along the curb into the sewer on the other side of the street and put their shirts back on.

“The rats get crazy where they start wrecking these old buildings,” Manny said.

The cranes and wrecking balls and urban-renewal signs were back with the early spring. They walked around a barricaded site. Water trickled along the gutters from an open hydrant, washing brick dust and debris toward the sewers.

“Can you smell that, man?” Manny asked him, suddenly excited. “I can smell the lake through the hydrant.”

“Smells like rust to me,” Eddie said.

“I can smell fish! Smelt — the smelt are in! I can smell them right through the hydrant!”

“Smelt?” Eddie said.

“You ain’t ever had smelt?” Manny asked. “Little silver fish!”

They caught the Twenty-sixth Street bus — the Polish Zephyr, people called it — going east toward the lake. The back of the bus was empty. They sat in the swaying, long backseat, taking hits out of the bottle in Eddie’s sleeve.

“It’s usually too early for them yet, but they’re out there, Eduardo,” Manny kept reassuring him, as if they were actually going fishing.

Eddie nodded. He didn’t know anything about smelt. The only fish he ate was canned tuna, but it felt good to be riding somewhere with the windows open and Manny acting more like his old self — sure of himself, laughing easily. Eddie still felt like talking, but his molars were grinding on speed.

The bus jolted down the dark block past Kedzie and was flying when it passed the narrow street between the ice house and the prison, but Eddie and Manny caught a glimpse out the back window of the railroad tracks that curved down the nameless street. The tracks were lined with fuming red flares that threw a red reflection off the concrete walls. Eddie was sure the flares had been set there for them.

Eddie closed his eyes and sank into the rocking of the bus. Even with his eyes closed he could see the reddish glare of the walls. The glare was ineradicable, at the back of his sockets. The wall had looked the same way it had looked in his dreams. They rode in silence.

“It’s like one long night,” Eddie said somewhere along the way.

His jaws were really grinding and his legs had forgotten gravity by the time they got to the lakefront. They didn’t know the time, but it must have been around 3:00 or 4:00 a.m. and the smelt fishers were still out. The lights of their kerosene lanterns reflected along the breakwater over the glossy black lake. Eddie and Manny could hear the water lapping under the pier and the fishermen talking in low voices in different languages.

“My uncle Carlos would talk to the fish,” Manny said. “No shit. He’d talk to them in Spanish. He didn’t have no choice. Whole time here he couldn’t speak English. Said it made his brain stuck. We used to come fishing here all the time — smelt, perch, everything. I’d come instead of going to school. If they weren’t hitting, he’d start talking to them, singing them songs.”

“Like what?” Eddie said.

“He’d make them up. They were funny, man. It don’t come across in English: ‘Little silver ones fill up my shoes. My heart is lonesome for the fish of the sea.’ It was like very formal how he’d say it. He’d always call this the sea. I’d tell him it’s a lake, but he couldn’t be talked out of it. He was very stubborn — too stubborn to learn English. I ain’t been fishing since he went back to Mexico.”

They walked to the end of the pier, then back past the fishermen. A lot of them were old men gently tugging lines between their fingers, lifting nets as if flying underwater kites, plucking the wriggling silver fish from the netting, the yellow light of their lamps glinting off the bright scales.

“I told you they were out here,” Manny said.

They sat on a concrete ledge, staring at the dark water, which rocked hypnotically below the soles of their dangling feet.

“Feel like diving in?” Manny asked.

Eddie had just raised the bottle to his lips and paused as if actually considering Manny’s question, then shook his head no and took a swallow.

“One time right before my uncle went back to Mexico we came fishing at night for perch,” Manny said. “It was a real hot night, you know? And all these old guys fishing off the pier. No one getting a bite, man, and I started thinking how cool and peaceful it would be to just dive in the water with the fish, and then, like I just did it without even deciding to, clothes and all. Sometimes, man, I still remember that feeling underwater — like I could just keep swimming out, didn’t need air, never had to come up. When I couldn’t hold my breath no more and came up I could hear my uncle calling my name, and then all the old guys on the pier start calling my name to come back. What I really felt like doing was to keep swimming out until I couldn’t hear them, until I couldn’t even see their lanterns, man. I wanted to be way the fuck out alone in the middle of the lake when the sun came up. But then I thought about my uncle standing on the pier calling me, so I turned around.”

They killed the bottle sitting on a concrete ledge and dropped it into the lake. Then they rode the El back. It was getting lighter without a dawn. The El windows were streaked with rain, the Douglas Avenue station smelled wet. It was a dark morning. They should have ended it then. Instead they sat at Manny’s kitchen table drinking instant coffee with canned milk. Eddie kept getting lost in the designs the milk would make, swirls and thunderclouds in his mug of coffee. He was numb and shaky. His jaw ached.

“I’m really crashin’,” he told Manny.

“Here,” Manny said. “Bring us down easier, man.”

“I don’t like doing downers, man,” Eddie said.

“’Ludes,” Manny said, “from Pancho’s stash.”

They sat across the table from each other for a long time — talking, telling their memories and secrets — only Eddie was too numb to remember exactly what they said. Their voices — his own as well as Manny’s — seemed outside, removed from the center of his mind.

At one point Manny looked out at the dark morning and said, “It still seems like last night.”

“That’s right,” Eddie agreed. He wanted to say more but couldn’t express it. He didn’t try. Eddie didn’t believe it was what they said that was important. Manny could be talking Spanish; I could be talking Polish, Eddie thought. It didn’t matter. What meant something was sitting at the table together, wrecked together, still awake watching the rainy light spatter the window, walking out again, to the Prague bakery for bismarcks, past people under dripping umbrellas on their way to church.

“Looks like Sunday,” Manny said.

“Today’s Friday,” Eddie said. “It’s Good Friday.”

“I seen ladies with ashes on their heads waiting for the bus a couple days ago,” Manny told him.

They stood in the doorway of the Prague, out of the rain, eating their bismarcks. Just down from the church, the bakery was a place people crowded into after mass. Its windows displayed colored eggs and little frosted Easter lambs.

“One time on Ash Wednesday I was eating a bismarck and Pancho made a cross on my forehead with the powdered sugar like it was ashes. When I went to church the priest wouldn’t give me real ashes,” Manny said with a grin.

It was one of the few times Eddie had heard Manny mention Pancho. Now that they were outside, Eddie’s head felt clearer than it had in the kitchen.

“I used to try and keep my ashes on until Good Friday,” he told Manny, “but they’d make me wash.”

The church bells were ringing, echoes bouncing off the sidewalks as if deflected by the ceiling of clouds. The neighborhood felt narrower, compressed from above.

“I wonder if it still looks the same in there,” Manny said as they passed the church.

They stepped in and stood in the vestibule. The saints of their childhood stood shrouded in purple. The altar was bare, stripped for Good Friday. Old ladies, ignoring the new liturgy, chanted a litany in Polish.

“Same as ever,” Eddie whispered as they backed out.

The rain had almost let up. They could hear its accumulated weight in the wing-flaps of pigeons.

“Good Friday was Pancho’s favorite holiday, man,” Manny said. “Everybody else always picked Christmas or Thanksgiving or Fourth of July. He hadda be different, man. I remember he used to drag me along visiting churches. You ever do that?”

“Hell, yeah,” Eddie said. “Every Good Friday we’d go on our bikes. You hadda visit seven of them.”

Without agreeing to it they walked from St. Roman’s to St. Michael’s, a little wooden Franciscan church in an Italian neighborhood; and from there to St. Casimir’s, a towering, mournful church with twin copper-green towers. Then, as if following an invisible trail, they walked north up Twenty-second toward St. Anne’s, St. Puis’s, St. Adalbert’s. At first they merely entered and left immediately, as if touching base, but their familiarity with small rituals quickly returned: dipping their fingers in the holy water font by the door, making the automatic sign of the cross as they passed the life-size crucified Christs that hung in the vestibules where old women and school kids clustered to kiss the spikes in the bronze or bloody plaster feet. By St. Anne’s, Manny removed his sunglasses, out of respect, the way one removes a hat. Eddie put them on. His eyes felt hard-boiled. The surge of energy he had felt at the bakery had burned out fast. While Manny genuflected to the altar, Eddie slumped in the back pew pretending to pray, drowsing off behind the dark glasses. It never occurred to Eddie to simply go home. His head ached, he could feel his heart racing, and would suddenly jolt awake wondering where Manny was. Manny would be off — jumpy, frazzled, still popping speed on the sly — exploring the church as if searching for something, standing among lines of parishioners waiting to kiss relics the priest wiped repeatedly clean with a rag of silk. Then Manny would be shaking Eddie awake. “How you holding up, man?”

“I’m cool,” he’d say, and they would be back on the streets heading for another parish under the overcast sky. Clouds, a shade between slate and lilac, smoked over the spires and roofs; lights flashed on in the bars and taquerías. On Eighteenth Street a great blue neon fish leapt in the storefront window of a tiny ostenaria. Eddie tried to note the exact location to add to his window collection. They headed along a wall of viaducts to St. Procopius, where, Manny said, both he and Pancho had been baptized. The viaduct walls had been painted by schoolchildren into a mural that seemed to go for miles.

“I don’t think we’re gonna make seven churches, man,” Eddie said. He was walking without lifting his feet, his hair plastered by a sweatlike drizzle. It was around 3:00 p.m. It had been 3:00 p.m. — Christ’s dark hour on the cross — inside the churches all day, but now it was turning 3:00 p.m. outside too. They could hear the ancient-sounding hymn “Tantum Ergo,” carrying from down the block.

Eddie sunk into the last pew, kneeling in the red glow of vigil lights that brought back the red flicker of the flares they had seen from the window of the bus as it sped by the prison. Manny had already faded into the procession making the stations of the cross — a shuffling crowd circling the church, kneeling before each station while altar boys censed incense and the priest recited Christ’s agony. Old women answered with prayers like moans.

Old women were walking on their knees up the marble aisle to kiss the relics. A few were crying, and Eddie remembered how back in grade school he had heard old women cry sometimes after confession, crying as if their hearts would break, and even as a child he had wondered how such old women could possibly have committed sins terrible enough to demand such bitter weeping. Most everything from that world had changed or disappeared, but the old women had endured — Polish, Bohemian, Spanish, he knew it didn’t matter; they were the same, dressed in black coats and babushkas the way holy statues wore violet, in constant mourning. A common pain of loss seemed to burn at the core of their lives, though Eddie had never understood exactly what it was they mourned. Nor how day after day they had sustained the intensity of their grief. He would have given up long ago. In a way he had given up, and the ache left behind couldn’t be called grief. He had no name for it. He had felt it before Pancho or anyone was lost, almost from the start of memory. If it was grief; it was grief for the living. The hymns, with their ancient, keening melodies and mysterious words, had brought the feeling back, but when he tried to discover the source, to give the feeling a name, it eluded him as always, leaving in its place nostalgia and triggered nerves.

Oh God, he prayed, I’m really crashing.

He was too shaky to kneel, so he stretched out on the pew, lying on his back, eyes shut behind sunglasses, until the church began to whirl. To control it he tried concentrating on the stained-glass window overhead. None of the windows that had ever been special for him were from a church. This one was an angel, its colors like jewels and coals. Afternoon seemed to be dying behind it, becoming part of the night, part of the private history that he and Manny continued between them like a pact. He could see night shining through the colors of the angel, dividing into bands as if the angel were a prism for darkness; the neon and wet streetlights illuminated its wingspread.

Legends

It started with ice.

That’s how Big Antek sometimes began the story.

At dusk a gang of little Mexican kids appeared with a few lumps of dry ice covered in a shoe box, as if they had caught a bird. Hot ice, they called it, though the way they said it sounded to Antek like hot eyes. Kids always have a way of finding stuff like that. One boy touched his tongue to a piece and screamed “Aye!” when it stuck. They watched the ice boil and fume in a rain puddle along the curb, and finally they filled a bottle part way with water, inserted the fragments of ice they had left, capped the bottle, and set it in the mouth of an alley waiting for an explosion. When it popped they scattered.

Manny Santora and Eddie Kapusta came walking up the alley, wanting Antek to buy them a bottle of rum at Buddy’s. Rum instead of beer. They were celebrating, Kapusta said, but he didn’t say what. Maybe one of them had found a job or had just been fired, or graduated, or joined the army instead of waiting around to get drafted. It could be anything. They were always celebrating. Behind their sunglasses Antek could see they were high as usual, even before Manny offered him a drag off a reefer the size of a cigar.

Probably nobody was hired or fired or had joined anything; probably it was just so hot they had a good excuse to act crazy. They each had a bottle of Coke they were fizzing up, squirting. Eddie had limes stuffed in his pockets and was pretending they were his balls. Manny had a plastic bag of the little ice cubes they sell at gas stations. It was half-melted, and they were scooping handfuls of cubes over each other’s heads, stuffing them down their jeans and yowling, rubbing ice on their chests and under their arms as if taking a cold shower. They looked like wild men — shirts hanging from their back pockets, handkerchiefs knotted around their heads, wearing sunglasses, their bodies slick with melted ice water and sweat; two guys in the prime of life going nowhere, both lean, Kapusta almost as tan as Santora, Santora with that frizzy beard under his lip, and Kapusta trying to juggle limes.

They were drinking rum using a method Antek had never seen before, and he had seen his share of drinking — not just in the neighborhood — all over the world when he was in the navy, and not the Bohemian navy either like somebody would always say when he would start telling navy stories.

They claimed they were drinking cuba libres, only they didn’t have glasses, so they were mixing the drinks in their mouths, starting with some little cubes, then pouring in rum, Coke, a squeeze of lime, and swallowing. Swallowing if one or the other didn’t suddenly bust up over some private joke, spraying the whole mouthful out, and both of them choking and coughing and laughing.

“Hey, Antek, lemme build you a drink,” Manny kept saying, but Antek shook his head no thanks, and he wasn’t known for passing up too many.

This was all going on in front of Buddy’s, everyone catching a blast of music and air-conditioning whenever the door opened. It was hot. The moths sizzled as soon as they hit Buddy’s buzzing orange sign. A steady beat of moths dropped like cinders on the blinking orange sidewalk where the kids were pitching pennies. Manny passed around what was left in the plastic bag of ice, and the kids stood sucking and crunching the cubes between their teeth.

It reminded Antek of summers when the ice trucks still delivered to Buddy’s — flatbeds covered with canvas, the icemen, mainly DPs, wearing leather aprons. Their Popeye forearms, even in August, looked ruddy with cold. They would slide the huge, clear blocks off the tailgate so the whump reverberated through the hollow under the sidewalks, and deep in the ice the clarity shattered. Then with their ice hooks they’d lug the blocks across the sidewalk, trailing a slick, and boot them skidding down the chute into Buddy’s beery-smelling cellar. And after the truck pulled away, kids would pick the splinters from the curb and suck them as if they were ice-flavored Popsicles.

Nobody seemed too interested when Antek tried to tell them about the ice trucks, or anything else about how the world had been, for that matter. Antek had been sick and had only recently returned from the VA hospital. Of all his wounds, sickness was the worst. He could examine his hacked butcher’s hands almost as kids from the neighborhood did, inspecting the stubs where his fingers had been as if they belonged to someone else, but there were places deep within himself that he couldn’t examine, yet where he could feel that something of himself far more essential than fingers was missing. He returned from the VA feeling old and as if the neighborhood had changed in the weeks he had been gone. People had changed. He couldn’t be sure, but they treated him differently, colder, as if he were becoming a stranger in the place he had grown up in, now, just when he most needed to belong.

“Hey, Antek,” Manny said, “you know what you can tell me? That girl that saved your life in the meat freezer, did she have good tits?”

“I tell you about a miracle and you ask me about tits?” Antek said. “I don’t talk about that anymore because now somebody always asks me did she have good tits. Go see.”

Kids had been trying for years to sneak into the icehouse to see her. It was what the neighborhood had instead of a haunted house. Each generation had grown up with the story of how her father had ridden with her half-naked body on the streetcar. Even the nuns had heard Antek’s story about finding the girl still frozen in the meat freezer. The butcher shop in Kedzie had closed long ago, and the legend was that after the cops had stopped checking, her body had been moved at night back into the icehouse. But the icehouse wasn’t easy to break into. It had stood padlocked and heavily boarded for years.

“They’re gonna wreck it,” Eddie said. “I went by on the bus and they got the crane out in front.”

“Uh-oh, last chance, Antek,” Manny said. “If you’re sure she’s in there, maybe we oughta go save her.”

“She’s in there,” Antek said. He noticed the little kids had stopped pitching pennies and were listening.

“Well, you owe her something after what she done for you — don’t he, Eduardo?”

The kids who were listening chuckled, then started to go back to their pennies.

“You wanna go, I’ll go!” Antek said loudly.

“All right, let’s go.”

Antek got up unsteadily. He stared at Eddie and Manny. “You guys couldn’t loan me enough for a taste of wine just until I get my disability check?”

The little kids tagged after them to the end of the block, then turned back bored. Manny and Eddie kept going, picking the pace up a step or two ahead of Antek, exchanging looks and grinning. But Antek knew that no matter how much they joked or what excuses they gave, they were going, like him, for one last look. They were just old enough to have seen the icehouse before it shut down. It was a special building, the kind a child couldn’t help but notice and remember — there, on the corner across the street from the prison, a factory that made ice, humming with fans, its louvered roof dripping and clacking, lost in acrid clouds of its own escaping vapor.

The automatic ice machine in front had already been carted away. The doors were still padlocked, but the way the crane was parked it was possible for Manny and Eddie to climb the boom onto the roof.

Antek waited below. He gazed up at the new Plexiglas guard turrets on the prison wall. From his angle all he could see was the bluish fluorescence of their lighting. He watched Manny and Eddie jump from the boom to the roof, high enough to stare across at the turrets like snipers, to draw a level bead on the backs of the guards, high enough to gaze over the wall at the dim, barred windows of the buildings that resembled foundries more than ever in the sweltering heat.

Below, Antek stood swallowing wine, expecting more from the night than a condemned building. He didn’t know exactly what else he expected. Perhaps only a scent, like the stab of remembered ammonia he might have detected if he were still young enough to climb the boom. Perhaps the secret isolation he imagined Manny and Eddie feeling now, alone on the roof, as if lost in clouds of vapor. At street level, passing traffic drowned out the tick of a single cricket keeping time on the roof — a cricket so loud and insistent that Manny didn’t stop to worry about the noise when he kicked in the louvers. And Antek, though he had once awakened in a freezer, couldn’t imagine the shock of cold that Manny and Eddie felt as they dropped out of the summer night to the floor below.

Earlier, on their way down Twenty-sixth, Manny had stopped to pick up an unused flare from along the tracks, and Antek pictured them inside now, Manny, his hand wrapped in a handkerchief, holding the flare away from him like a Roman candle, its red glare sputtering off the beams and walls.

There wasn’t much to see — empty corners, insulated pipes. Their breaths steamed. They tugged on their shirts. Instinctively, they traced the cold down a metal staircase. Cold was rising from the ground floor through the soles of their gym shoes.

The ground floor was stacked to the ceiling with junked ice machines. A wind as from an enormous air conditioner was blowing down a narrow aisle between the machines. At the end of the aisle a concrete ramp slanted down to the basement.

That was where Antek suspected they would end up, the basement, a cavernous space extending under the nameless street, slowly collapsing as if the thick, melting pillars of ice along its walls had served as its foundation. The floor was spongy with waterlogged sawdust. An echoing rain plipped from the ceiling. The air smelled thawed, and ached clammy in the lungs.

“It’s fuckin’ freezing,” Eddie whispered.

Manny swung the flare in a slow arc, its reflections glancing as if they stood among cracked mirrors. Blocks of ice, framed in defrosted freezer coils, glowed back faintly, like aquarium windows, from niches along the walls. They were melting unevenly and leaned at precarious angles. Several had already tottered to the sawdust, where they lay like quarry stones from a wrecked cathedral. Manny and Eddie picked their way among them, pausing to wipe the slick of water from their surfaces and peer into the ice, but deep networks of cracks refracted the light. They could see only frozen shadows and had to guess at the forms: fish, birds, shanks of meat, a dog, a cat, a chair, what appeared to be a bicycle.

But Antek knew they would recognize her when they found her. There would be no mistaking the light. In the smoky, phosphorous glare her hair would reflect gold like a candle behind a frosted pane. He was waiting for them to bring her out. He had finished the wine and flung the pint bottle onto the street so that it shattered. The streets were empty. He was waiting patiently, and though he had nowhere else to be it was still a long wait. He would wait as long as it might take, but even so he wondered if there was time enough left to him for another miracle in his life. He could hear the cricket now, composing time instead of music, working its way headfirst from the roof down the brick wall. Listening to it, Antek became acutely aware of the silence of the prison across the street. He thought of all the men on the other side of the wall and wondered how many were still awake, listening to the cricket, waiting patiently as they sweated in the heavy night.

Manny and Eddie, shivering, their hands burning numb from grappling with ice, unbarred the rear door that opened onto the loading platform behind the icehouse. They pushed out an old handcar and rolled it onto the tracks that came right up to the dock. They had already slid the block of ice onto the handcar and draped it with a canvas tarp. Even gently inching it on they had heard the ice cracking. The block of ice had felt too light for its size, fragile, ready to break apart.

“It feels like we’re kidnapping somebody,” Eddie whispered.

“Just think of it as ice.”

“I can’t.”

“We can’t just leave her here, Eduardo.”

“What’ll we do with her?”

“We’ll think of something.”

“What about Antek?”

“Forget him.”

They pushed off. Rust slowed them at first, but as the tracks inclined toward the river they gained momentum. It was like learning to row. By the trestle they hit their rhythm. Speed became wind — hair blowing, shirts flapping open, the tarp billowing up off the ice. The skyline gleamed ahead, and though Manny couldn’t see the lake, he could feel it stretching beyond the skyscrapers; he could recall the sudden lightness of freedom he’d felt once when he had speared out underwater and glided effortlessly away, one moment expanding into another, while the flow of water cleansed him of memory, and not even the sound of his own breath disrupted the silence. The smelt would have disappeared to wherever they disappeared to, but the fishermen would still be sitting at the edge of the breakwater, their backs to the city, dreaming up fish. And if the fishermen still remembered his name, they might call it again repeatedly in a chorus of voices echoing out over the dark surface of the water, but this time, Manny knew, there would be no turning back. He knew now where they were taking her, where she would finally be released. They were rushing through waist-deep weeds, crossing the vast tracts of prairie behind the factories, clattering over bridges and viaducts. Below, streetlights shimmered watery in the old industrial neighborhoods. Shiny with sweat, the girl already melting free between them, they forced themselves faster, rowing like a couple of sailors.

Lost

I remember, though I might have dreamed it, a radio show I listened to when we lived on Eighteenth Street above the taxidermist. It was a program in which kids phoned the station and reported something they’d lost — a code ring, a cap gun, a ball, a doll — always their favorite. And worse than lost toys, pets, not just dogs and cats, but hamsters, parakeets, dime store turtles with painted shells.

I’d tune to the program by accident, then forget about it, and each time I rediscovered it, it made me feel as if I were reliving the time before. The lost pets would always make me think of the old Hungarian downstairs who, people said, skinned stray cats, and of my secret pets, the foxes in his murky shop window, their glass eyes glittering fiercely from a dusty jungle of ferns, and their lips retracted in a constant snarl.

Magically, by the end of the program, everything would be found. I still don’t know how they accomplished this, and recall wondering if it would work to phone in and report something I’d always wanted as missing. For it seemed to me then that something one always wanted, but never had, was his all the same, and wasn’t it lost?

Pet Milk

Today I’ve been drinking instant coffee and Pet milk, and watching it snow. It’s not that I enjoy the taste especially, but I like the way Pet milk swirls in the coffee. Actually, my favorite thing about Pet milk is what the can opener does to the top of the can. The can is unmistakable — compact, seamless looking, its very shape suggesting that it could condense milk without any trouble. The can opener bites in neatly, and the thick liquid spills from the triangular gouge with a different look and viscosity than milk. Pet milk isn’t real milk. The color’s off, to start with. There’s almost something of the past about it, like old ivory. My grandmother always drank it in her coffee. When friends dropped over and sat around the kitchen table, my grandma would ask, “Do you take cream and sugar?” Pet milk was the cream.

There was a yellow plastic radio on her kitchen table, usually tuned to the polka station, though sometimes she’d miss it by half a notch and get the Greek station instead, or the Spanish, or the Ukrainian. In Chicago, where we lived, all the incompatible states of Europe were pressed together down at the staticky right end of the dial. She didn’t seem to notice, as long as she wasn’t hearing English. The radio, turned low, played constantly. Its top was warped and turning amber on the side where the tubes were. I remember the sound of it on winter afternoons after school, as I sat by her table watching the Pet milk swirl and cloud in the steaming coffee, and noticing, outside her window, the sky doing the same thing above the railroad yard across the street.

And I remember, much later, seeing the same swirling sky in tiny liqueur glasses containing a drink called a King Alphonse: the crème de cacao rising like smoke in repeated explosions, blooming in kaleidoscopic clouds through the layer of heavy cream. This was in the Pilsen, a little Czech restaurant where my girlfriend, Kate, and I would go sometimes in the evening. It was the first year out of college for both of us, and we had astonished ourselves by finding real jobs — no more waitressing or pumping gas, the way we’d done in school. I was investigating credit references at a bank, and she was doing something slightly above the rank of typist for Hornblower & Weeks, the investment firm. My bank showed training films that emphasized the importance of suitable dress, good grooming, and personal neatness, even for employees like me, who worked at the switchboard in the basement. Her firm issued directives on appropriate attire — skirts, for instance, should cover the knees. She had lovely knees.

Kate and I would sometimes meet after work at the Pilsen, dressed in our proper business clothes and still feeling both a little self-conscious and glamorous, as if we were impostors wearing disguises. The place had small, round oak tables, and we’d sit in a corner under a painting called “The Street Musicians of Prague” and trade future plans as if they were escape routes. She talked of going to grad school in Europe; I wanted to apply to the Peace Corps. Our plans for the future made us laugh and feel close, but those same plans somehow made anything more than temporary between us seem impossible. It was the first time I’d ever had the feeling of missing someone I was still with.

The waiters in the Pilsen wore short black jackets over long white aprons. They were old men from the old country. We went there often enough to have our own special waiter, Rudi, a name he pronounced with a rolled R. Rudi boned our trout and seasoned our salads, and at the end of the meal he’d bring the bottle of crème de cacao from the bar, along with two little glasses and a small pitcher of heavy cream, and make us each a King Alphonse right at our table. We’d watch as he’d fill the glasses halfway up with the syrupy brown liqueur, then carefully attempt to float a layer of cream on top. If he failed to float the cream, we’d get that one free.

“Who was King Alphonse anyway, Rudi?” I sometimes asked, trying to break his concentration, and if that didn’t work I nudged the table with my foot so the glass would jiggle imperceptibly just as he was floating the cream. We’d usually get one on the house. Rudi knew what I was doing. In fact, serving the King Alphonses had been his idea, and he had also suggested the trick of jarring the table. I think it pleased him, though he seemed concerned about the way I’d stare into the liqueur glass, watching the patterns.

“It’s not a microscope,” he’d say. “Drink.”

He liked us, and we tipped extra. It felt good to be there and to be able to pay for a meal.

Kate and I met at the Pilsen for supper on my twenty-second birthday. It was May, and unseasonably hot. I’d opened my tie. Even before looking at the dinner menu, we ordered a bottle of Mumm’s and a dozen oysters apiece. Rudi made a sly remark when he brought the oysters on platters of ice. They were freshly opened and smelled of the sea. I’d heard people joke about oysters being aphrodisiac but never considered it anything but a myth — the kind of idea they still had in the old country.

We squeezed on lemon, added dabs of horseradish, slid the oysters into our mouths, and then rinsed the shells with champagne and drank the salty, cold juice. There was a beefy-looking couple eating schnitzel at the next table, and they stared at us with the repugnance that public oyster-eaters in the Midwest often encounter. We laughed and grandly sipped it all down. I was already half tipsy from drinking too fast, and starting to feel filled with a euphoric, aching energy. Kate raised a brimming oyster shell to me in a toast: “To the Peace Corps!”

“To Europe!” I replied, and we clunked shells.

She touched her wineglass to mine and whispered, “Happy birthday,” and then suddenly leaned across the table and kissed me.

When she sat down again, she was flushed. I caught the reflection of her face in the glass-covered “The Street Musicians of Prague” above our table. I always loved seeing her in mirrors and windows. The reflections of her beauty startled me. I had told her that once, and she seemed to fend off the compliment, saying, “That’s because you’ve learned what to look for,” as if it were a secret I’d stumbled upon. But, this time, seeing her reflection hovering ghostlike upon an imaginary Prague was like seeing a future from which she had vanished. I knew I’d never meet anyone more beautiful to me.

We killed the champagne and sat twining fingers across the table. I was sweating. I could feel the warmth of her through her skirt under the table and I touched her leg. We still hadn’t ordered dinner. I left money on the table and we steered each other out a little unsteadily.

“Rudi will understand,” I said.

The street was blindingly bright. A reddish sun angled just above the rims of the tallest buildings. I took my suit coat off and flipped it over my shoulder. We stopped in the doorway of a shoe store to kiss.

“Let’s go somewhere,” she said.

My roommate would already be home at my place, which was closer. Kate lived up north, in Evanston. It seemed a long way away.

We cut down a side street, past a fire station, to a small park, but its gate was locked. I pressed close to her against the tall iron fence. We could smell the lilacs from a bush just inside the fence, and when I jumped for an overhanging branch my shirt sleeve hooked on a fence spike and tore, and petals rained down on us as the sprig sprang from my hand.

We walked to the subway. The evening rush was winding down; we must have caught the last express heading toward Evanston. Once the train climbed from the tunnel to the elevated tracks, it wouldn’t stop until the end of the line, on Howard. There weren’t any seats together, so we stood swaying at the front of the car, beside the empty conductor’s compartment. We wedged inside, and I clicked the door shut.

The train rocked and jounced, clattering north. We were kissing, trying to catch the rhythm of the ride with our bodies. The sun bronzed the windows on our side of the train. I lifted her skirt over her knees, hiked it higher so the sun shone off her thighs, and bunched it around her waist. She wouldn’t stop kissing. She was moving her hips to pin us to each jolt of the train.

We were speeding past scorched brick walls, gray windows, back porches outlined in sun, roofs, and treetops — the landscape of the El I’d memorized from subway windows over a lifetime of rides: the podiatrist’s foot sign past Fullerton; the bright pennants of Wrigley Field, at Addison; ancient hotels with TRANSIENTS WELCOME signs on their flaking back walls; peeling and graffiti-smudged billboards; the old cemetery just before Wilson Avenue. Even without looking, I knew almost exactly where we were. Within the compartment, the sound of our quick breathing was louder than the clatter of tracks. I was trying to slow down, to make it all last, and when she covered my mouth with her hand I turned my face to the window and looked out.

The train was braking a little from express speed, as it did each time it passed a local station. I could see blurred faces on the long wooden platform watching us pass — businessmen glancing up from folded newspapers, women clutching purses and shopping bags. I could see the expression on each face, momentarily arrested, as we flashed by. A high school kid in shirt sleeves, maybe sixteen, with books tucked under one arm and a cigarette in his mouth, caught sight of us, and in the instant before he disappeared he grinned and started to wave. Then he was gone, and I turned from the window, back to Kate, forgetting everything — the passing stations, the glowing late sky, even the sense of missing her — but that arrested wave stayed with me. It was as if I were standing on that platform, with my schoolbooks and a smoke, on one of those endlessly accumulated afternoons after school when I stood almost outside of time simply waiting for a train, and I thought how much I’d have loved seeing someone like us streaming by.

0 notes

fromprison2002 · 6 months

Text

Sci-fi

CLOSER BY GREG EGAN

Nobody wants to spend eternity alone.

(‘Intimacy,’ I once told Sian, after we’d made love, ‘is the only cure for solipsism.’ She laughed and said, ‘Don’t get too ambitious, Michael. So far, it hasn’t even cured me of masturbation.’)

True solipsism, though, was never my problem. From the very first time I considered the question, I accepted that there could be no way of proving the reality of an external world, let alone the existence of other minds—but I also accepted that taking both on faith was the only practical way of dealing with everyday life.

The question which obsessed me was this: Assuming that other people existed, how did they apprehend that existence? How did they experience being? Could I ever truly understand what consciousness was like for another person—any more than I could for an ape, or a cat, or an insect?

If not, I was alone.

I desperately wanted to believe that other people were somehow knowable, but it wasn’t something I could bring myself to take for granted. I knew there could be no absolute proof, but I wanted to be persuaded, I needed to be compelled.

No literature, no poetry, no drama, however personally resonant I found it, could ever quite convince me that I’d glimpsed the author’s soul. Language had evolved to facilitate cooperation in the conquest of the physical world, not to describe subjective reality. Love, anger, jealousy, resentment, grief—all were defined, ultimately, in terms of external circumstances and observable actions.

When an image or metaphor rang true for me, it proved only that I shared with the author a set of definitions, a culturally sanctioned list of word associations. After all, many publishers used computer programs—highly specialised, but unsophisticated algorithms, without the remotest possibility of self-awareness—to routinely produce both literature, and literary criticism, indistinguishable from the human product. Not just formularised garbage, either; on several occasions, I’d been deeply affected by works which I’d later discovered had been cranked out by unthinking software. This didn’t prove that human literature communicated nothing of the author’s inner life, but it certainly made clear how much room there was for doubt.

Unlike many of my friends, I had no qualms whatsoever when, at the age of eighteen, the time came for me to ‘switch.’ My organic brain was removed and discarded, and control of my body handed over to my ‘jewel’—the Ndoli Device, a neural-net computer implanted shortly after birth, which had since learnt to imitate my brain, down to the level of individual neurons. I had no qualms, not because I was at all convinced that the jewel and the brain experienced consciousness identically, but because, from an early age, I’d identified myself solely with the jewel. My brain was a kind of bootstrap device, nothing more, and to mourn its loss would have been as absurd as mourning my emergence from some primitive stage of embryological neural development. Switching was simply what humans did now, an established part of the life cycle, even if it was mediated by our culture, and not by our genes.

Seeing each other die, and observing the gradual failure of their own bodies, may have helped convince pre-Ndoli humans of their common humanity; certainly, there were countless references in their literature to the equalising power of death. Perhaps concluding that the universe would go on without them produced a shared sense of hopelessness, or insignificance, which they viewed as their defining attribute.

Now that it’s become an article of faith that, sometime in the next few billion years, physicists will find a way for us to go on without the universe, rather than vice versa, that route to spiritual equality has lost whatever dubious logic it might ever have possessed.

Sian was a communications engineer. I was a holovision news editor. We met during a live broadcast of the seeding of Venus with terraforming nanomachines—a matter of great public interest, since most of the planet’s as-yet-uninhabitable surface had already been sold. There were several technical glitches with the broadcast which might have been disastrous, but together we managed to work around them, and even to hide the seams. It was nothing special, we were simply doing our jobs, but afterwards I was elated out of all proportion. It took me twenty-four hours to realise (or decide) that I’d fallen in love.

However, when I approached her the next day, she made it clear that she felt nothing for me; the chemistry I’d imagined ‘between us’ had all been in my head. I was dismayed, but not surprised. Work didn’t bring us together again, but I called her occasionally, and six weeks later my persistence was rewarded. I took her to a performance of Waiting for Godot by augmented parrots, and I enjoyed myself immensely, but I didn’t see her again for more than a month.

I’d almost given up hope, when she appeared at my door without warning one night and dragged me along to a ‘concert’ of interactive computerised improvisation. The ‘audience’ was assembled in what looked like a mock-up of a Berlin nightclub of the 2050s. A computer program, originally designed for creating movie scores, was fed with the image from a hover-camera which wandered about the set. People danced and sang, screamed and brawled, and engaged in all kinds of histrionics in the hope of attracting the camera and shaping the music. At first, I felt cowed and inhibited, but Sian gave me no choice but to join in.

It was chaotic, insane, at times even terrifying. One woman stabbed another to ‘death’ at the table beside us, which struck me as a sickening (and expensive) indulgence, but when a riot broke out at the end, and people started smashing the deliberately flimsy furniture, I followed Sian into the melee, cheering.

The music—the excuse for the whole event—was garbage, but I didn’t really care. When we limped out into the night, bruised and aching and laughing, I knew that at least we’d shared something that had made us feel closer. She took me home and we went to bed together, too sore and tired to do more than sleep, but when we made love in the morning I already felt so at ease with her that I could hardly believe it was our first time.

Soon we were inseparable. My tastes in entertainment were very different from hers, but I survived most of her favourite ‘artforms’, more or less intact. She moved into my apartment, at my suggestion, and casually destroyed the orderly rhythms of my carefully arranged domestic life.

I had to piece together details of her past from throwaway lines; she found it far too boring to sit down and give me a coherent account. Her life had been as unremarkable as mine: she’d grown up in a suburban, middle-class family, studied her profession, found a job. Like almost everyone, she’d switched at eighteen. She had no strong political convictions. She was good at her work, but put ten times more energy into her social life. She was intelligent, but hated anything overtly intellectual. She was impatient, aggressive, roughly affectionate.

And I could not, for one second, imagine what it was like inside her head.

For a start, I rarely had any idea what she was thinking—in the sense of knowing how she would have replied if asked, out of the blue, to describe her thoughts at the moment before they were interrupted by the question. On a longer time scale, I had no feeling for her motivation, her image of herself, her concept of who she was and what she did and why. Even in the laughably crude sense that a novelist pretends to ‘explain’ a character, I could not have explained Sian.

And if she’d provided me with a running commentary on her mental state, and a weekly assessment of the reasons for her actions in the latest psychodynamic jargon, it would all have come to nothing but a heap of useless words. If I could have pictured myself in her circumstances, imagined myself with her beliefs and obsessions, empathised until I could anticipate her every word, her every decision, then I still would not have understood so much as a single moment when she closed her eyes, forgot her past, wanted nothing, and simply was. Of course, most of the time, nothing could have mattered less. We were happy enough together, whether or not we were strangers—and whether or not my ‘happiness’ and Sian’s ‘happiness’ were in any real sense the same.

Over the years, she became less self-contained, more open. She had no great dark secrets to share, no traumatic childhood ordeals to recount, but she let me in on her petty fears and her mundane neuroses. I did the same, and even, clumsily, explained my peculiar obsession. She wasn’t at all offended. Just puzzled.

‘What could it actually mean, though? To know what it’s like to be someone else? You’d have to have their memories, their personality, their body—everything. And then you’d just be them, not yourself, and you wouldn’t know anything. It’s nonsense.’

I shrugged. ‘Not necessarily. Of course, perfect knowledge would be impossible, but you can always get closer. Don’t you think that the more things we do together, the more experiences we share, the closer we become?’

She scowled. ‘Yes, but that’s not what you were talking about five seconds ago. Two years, or two thousand years, of ‘shared experiences’ seen through different eyes means nothing. However much time two people spent together, how could you know that there was even the briefest instant when they both experienced what they were going through ‘together’ in the same way?’

‘I know, but…’

‘If you admit that what you want is impossible, maybe you’ll stop fretting about it.’

I laughed. ‘Whatever makes you think I’m as rational as that?’

When the technology became available it was Sian’s idea, not mine, for us to try out all the fashionable somatic permutations. Sian was always impatient to experience something new. ‘If we really are going to live forever,’ she said, ‘we’d better stay curious if we want to stay sane.’

I was reluctant, but any resistance I put up seemed hypocritical. Clearly, this game wouldn’t lead to the perfect knowledge I longed for (and knew I would ever achieve), but I couldn’t deny the possibility that it might be one crude step in the right direction.

First, we exchanged bodies. I discovered what it was like to have breasts and a vagina—what it was like for me, that is, not what it had been like for Sian. True, we stayed swapped long enough for the shock, and even the novelty, to wear off, but I never felt that I’d gained much insight into her experience of the body she’d been born with. My jewel was modified only as much as was necessary to allow me to control this unfamiliar machine, which was scarcely more than would have been required to work another male body. The menstrual cycle had been abandoned decades before, and although I could have taken the necessary hormones to allow myself to have periods, and even to become pregnant (although the financial disincentives for reproduction had been drastically increased in recent years), that would have told me absolutely nothing about Sian, who had done neither.

As for sex, the pleasure of intercourse still felt very much the same—which was hardly surprising, since nerves from the vagina and clitoris were simply wired into my jewel as if they’d come from my penis. Even being penetrated made less difference than I’d expected; unless I made a special effort to remain aware of our respective geometries, I found it hard to care who was doing what to whom. Orgasms were better though, I had to admit.

At work, no one raised an eyebrow when I turned up as Sian, since many of my colleagues had already been through exactly the same thing. The legal definition of identity had recently been shifted from the DNA fingerprint of the body, according to a standard set of markers, to the serial number of the jewel. When even the law can keep up with you, you know you can’t be doing anything very radical or profound.

After three months, Sian had had enough. ‘I never realised how clumsy you were,’ she said. ‘Or that ejaculation was so dull.’

Next, she had a clone of herself made, so we could both be women. Brain-damaged replacement bodies—Extras—had once been incredibly expensive, when they’d needed to be grown at virtually the normal rate, and kept constantly active so they’d be healthy enough to use. However, the physiological effects of the passage of time, and of exercise, don’t happen by magic; at a deep enough level, there’s always a biochemical signal produced, which can ultimately be faked. Mature Extras, with sturdy bones and perfect muscle tone, could now be produced from scratch in a year—four months’ gestation and eight months’ coma—which also allowed them to be more thoroughly brain-dead than before, soothing the ethical qualms of those who’d always wondered just how much was going on inside the heads of the old, active versions.

In our first experiment, the hardest part for me had always been, not looking in the mirror and seeing Sian, but looking at Sian and seeing myself. I’d missed her, far more than I’d missed being myself. Now, I was almost happy for my body to be absent (in storage, kept alive by a jewel based on the minimal brain of an Extra). The symmetry of being her twin appealed to me; surely now we were closer than ever. Before, we’d merely swapped our physical differences. Now, we’d abolished them.

The symmetry was an illusion. I’d changed gender, and she hadn’t. I was with the woman I loved; she lived with a walking parody of herself.

One morning she woke me, pummelling my breasts so hard that she left bruises. When I opened my eyes and shielded myself, she peered at me suspiciously. ‘Are you in there? Michael? I’m going crazy. I want you back.’

For the sake of getting the whole bizarre episode over and done with for good—and perhaps also to discover for myself what Sian had just been through—I agreed to the third permutation. There was no need to wait a year; my Extra had been grown at the same time as hers.

Somehow, it was far more disorienting to be confronted by ‘myself’ without the camouflage of Sian’s body. I found my own face unreadable; when we’d both been in disguise, that hadn’t bothered me, but now it made me feel edgy, and at times almost paranoid, for no rational reason at all.

Sex took some getting used to. Eventually, I found it pleasurable, in a confusing and vaguely narcissistic way. The compelling sense of equality I’d felt, when we’d made love as women, never quite returned to me as we sucked each other’s cocks—but then, when we’d both been women, Sian had never claimed to feel any such thing. It had all been my own invention.

The day after we returned to the way we’d begun (well, almost—in fact, we put our decrepit, twenty-six-year-old bodies in storage, and took up residence in our healthier Extras), I saw a story from Europe on an option we hadn’t yet tried, tipped to become all the rage: hermaphroditic identical twins. Our new bodies could be our biological children (give or take the genetic tinkering required to ensure hermaphroditism), with an equal share of characteristics from both of us. We would both have changed gender, both have lost partners. We’d be equal in every way.

I took a copy of the file home to Sian. She watched it thoughtfully, then said, ‘Slugs are hermaphrodites, aren’t they? They hang in mid-air together on a thread of slime. I’m sure there’s even something in Shakespeare, remarking on the glorious spectacle of copulating slugs. Imagine it: you and me, making slug love.’

I fell on the floor, laughing.

I stopped, suddenly. ‘Where, in Shakespeare? I didn’t think you’d even read Shakespeare.’

Eventually, I came to believe that with each passing year, I knew Sian a little better—in the traditional sense, the sense that most couples seemed to find sufficient. I knew what she expected from me, I knew how not to hurt her. We had arguments, we had fights, but there must have been some kind of underlying stability, because in the end we always chose to stay together. Her happiness mattered to me, very much, and at times I could hardly believe that I’d ever thought it possible that all of her subjective experience might be fundamentally alien to me. It was true that every brain, and hence every jewel, was unique—but there was something extravagant in supposing that the nature of consciousness could be radically different between individuals, when the same basic hardware, and the same basic principles of neural topology, were involved.

* * *

Still. Sometimes, if I woke in the night, I’d turn to her and whisper, inaudibly, compulsively, ‘I don’t know you. I have no idea who, or what, you are.’ I’d lie there, and think about packing and leaving. I was alone, and it was farcical to go through the charade of pretending otherwise.

Then again, sometimes I woke in the night, absolutely convinced that I was dying, or something else equally absurd. In the sway of some half-forgotten dream, all manner of confusion is possible. It never meant a thing, and by morning I was always myself again. When I saw the story on Craig Bentley’s service—he called it ‘research,’ but his ‘volunteers’ paid for the privilege of taking part in his experiments—I almost couldn’t bring myself to include it in the bulletin, although all my professional judgement told me it was everything our viewers wanted in a thirty second techno-shock piece: bizarre, even mildly disconcerting, but not too hard to grasp.

Bentley was a cyberneurologist; he studied the Ndoli Device, in the way that neurologists had once studied the brain. Mimicking the brain with a neural-net computer had not required a profound understanding of its higher-level structures; research into these structures continued, in their new incarnation. The jewel, compared to the brain, was of course both easier to observe, and easier to manipulate.

In his latest project, Bentley was offering couples something slightly more up-market than an insight into the sex lives of slugs. He was offering them eight hours with identical minds.

I made a copy of the original, ten-minute piece that had come through on the fibre, then let my editing console select the most titillating thirty seconds possible, for broadcast. It did a good job; it had learnt from me.

I couldn’t lie to Sian. I couldn’t hide the story, I couldn’t pretend to be disinterested. The only honest thing to do was to show her the file, tell her exactly how I felt, and ask her what she wanted.

I did just that. When the HV image faded out, she turned to me, shrugged, and said mildly, ‘Okay. It sounds like fun. Let’s try it.’

* * *

Bentley wore a T-shirt with nine computer-drawn portraits on it, in a three-by-three grid. Top left was Elvis Presley. Bottom right was Marilyn Monroe. The rest were various stages in between.

‘This is how it will work. The transition will take twenty minutes, during which time you’ll be disembodied. Over the first ten minutes, you’ll gain equal access to each other’s memories. Over the second ten minutes, you’ll both be moved, gradually, towards the compromise personality.

‘Once that’s done, your Ndoli Devices will be identical—in the sense that both will have all the same neural connections with all the same weighting factors—but they’ll almost certainly be in different states. I’ll have to black you out, to correct that. Then you’ll wake—‘

Who’ll wake?

‘—in identical electromechanical bodies. Clones can’t be made sufficiently alike.

‘You’ll spend the eight hours alone, in perfectly matched rooms. Rather like hotel suites, really. You’ll have HV to keep you amused if you need it—without the videophone module, of course. You might think you’d both get an engaged signal, if you tried to call the same number simultaneously—but in fact, in such cases the switching equipment arbitrarily lets one call through, which would make your environments different.’

Sian asked, ‘Why can’t we phone each other? Or better still, meet each other? If we’re exactly the same, we’d say the same things, do the same things—we’d be one more identical part of each other’s environment.’

Bentley pursed his lips and shook his head. ‘Perhaps I’ll allow something of the kind in a future experiment, but for now I believe it would be too… potentially traumatic.’

Sian gave me a sideways glance, which meant: This man is a killjoy.

‘The end will be like the beginning, in reverse. First, your personalities will be restored. Then, you’ll lose access to each other’s memories. Of course, your memories of the experience itself will be left untouched. Untouched by me, that is; I can’t predict how your separate personalities, once restored, will act—filtering, suppressing, reinterpreting those memories. Within minutes, you may end up with very different ideas about what you’ve been through. All I can guarantee is this: For the eight hours in question, the two of you will be identical.’

* * *

We talked it over. Sian was enthusiastic, as always. She didn’t much care what it would be like; all that really mattered to her was collecting one more novel experience.

‘Whatever happens, we’ll be ourselves again at the end of it,’ she said. ‘What’s there to be afraid of? You know the old Ndoli joke.’

‘What old Ndoli joke?’

‘Anything’s bearable—so long as it’s finite.’

I couldn’t decide how I felt. The sharing of memories notwithstanding, we’d both end up knowing, not each other, but merely a transient, artificial third person. Still, for the first time in our lives, we would have been through exactly the same experience, from exactly the same point of view—even if the experience was only spending eight hours locked in separate rooms, and the point of view was that of a genderless robot with an identity crisis.

It was a compromise—but I could think of no realistic way in which it could have been improved.

I called Bentley, and made a reservation.

* * *

In perfect sensory deprivation, my thoughts seemed to dissipate into the blackness around me before they were even half-formed. This isolation didn’t last long, though; as our short-term memories merged, we achieved a kind of telepathy: One of us would think a message, and the other would ‘remember’ thinking it, and reply in the same way.

- I really can’t wait to uncover all your grubby little secrets.

- I think you’re going to be disappointed. Anything I haven’t already told you, I’ve probably repressed.

- Ah, but repressed is not erased. Who knows what will turn up?

- We’ll know, soon enough.

I tried to think of all the minor sins I must have committed over the years, all the shameful, selfish, unworthy thoughts, but nothing came into my head but a vague white noise of guilt. I tried again, and achieved, of all things, an image of Sian as a child. A young boy slipping his hand between her legs, then squealing with fright and pulling away. But she’d described that incident to me, long ago. Was it her memory, or my reconstruction?

- My memory. I think. Or perhaps my reconstruction. You know, half the time when I’ve told you something that happened before we met, the memory of the telling has become far clearer to me than the memory itself. Almost replacing it.

- It’s the same for me.

- Then in a way, our memories have already been moving towards a kind of symmetry, for years. We both remember what was said, as if we’d both heard it from someone else.

Agreement. Silence. A moment of confusion. Then:

- This neat division of ‘memory’ and ‘personality’ Bentley uses; is it really so clear? Jewels are neural-net computers; you can’t talk about ‘data’ and ‘program’ in any absolute sense.

- Not in general, no. His classification must be arbitrary, to some extent. But who cares?

- It matters. If he restores ‘personality,’ but allows ‘memories’ to persist, a misclassification could leave us…

- What?

- It depends, doesn’t it? At one extreme, so thoroughly ‘restored,’ so completely unaffected, that the whole experience might as well not have happened. And at the other extreme…

- Permanently…

- …closer.

- Isn’t that the point?

- I don’t know anymore.

Silence. Hesitation.

Then I realised that I had no idea whether or not it was my turn to reply.

* * *

I woke, lying on a bed, mildly bemused, as if waiting for a mental hiatus to pass. My body felt slightly awkward, but less so than when I’d woken in someone else’s Extra. I glanced down at the pale, smooth plastic of my torso and legs, then waved a hand in front of my face. I looked like a unisex shop-window dummy—but Bentley had shown us the bodies beforehand, it was no great shock. I sat up slowly, then stood and took a few steps. I felt a little numb and hollow, but my kinaesthetic sense, my proprioception, was fine; I felt located between my eyes, and I felt that this body was mine. As with any modern transplant, my jewel had been manipulated directly to accommodate the change, avoiding the need for months of physiotherapy.

I glanced around the room. It was sparsely furnished: one bed, one table, one chair, one clock, one HV set. On the wall, a framed reproduction of an Escher lithograph: ‘Bond of Union,’ a portrait of the artist and, presumably, his wife, faces peeled like lemons into helices of rind, joined into a single, linked band. I traced the outer surface from start to finish, and was disappointed to find that it lacked the Möbius twist I was expecting.

No windows, one door without a handle. Set into the wall beside the bed, a full-length mirror. I stood a while and stared at my ridiculous form. It suddenly occurred to me that, if Bentley had a real love of symmetry games, he might have built one room as the mirror image of the other, modified the HV set accordingly, and altered one jewel, one copy of me, to exchange right for left. What looked like a mirror could then be nothing but a window between the rooms. I grinned awkwardly with my plastic face; my reflection looked appropriately embarrassed by the sight. The idea appealed to me, however unlikely it was. Nothing short of an experiment in nuclear physics could reveal the difference. No, not true; a pendulum free to precess, like Foucault’s, would twist the same way in both rooms, giving the game away. I walked up to the mirror and thumped it. It didn’t seem to yield at all, but then, either a brick wall, or an equal and opposite thump from behind, could have been the explanation.

I shrugged and turned away. Bentley might have done anything—for all I knew, the whole set-up could have been a computer simulation. My body was irrelevant. The room was irrelevant. The point was…

I sat on the bed. I recalled someone—Michael, probably—wondering if I’d panic when I dwelt upon my nature, but I found no reason to do so. If I’d woken in this room with no recent memories, and tried to sort out who I was from my past(s), I’d no doubt have gone mad, but I knew exactly who I was, I had two long trails of anticipation leading to my present state. The prospect of being changed back into Sian or Michael didn’t bother me at all; the wishes of both to regain their separate identities endured in me, strongly, and the desire for personal integrity manifested itself as relief at the thought of their re-emergence, not as fear of my own demise. In any case, my memories would not be expunged, and I had no sense of having goals which one or the other of them would not pursue. I felt more like their lowest common denominator than any kind of synergistic hypermind; I was less, not more, than the sum of my parts. My purpose was strictly limited: I was here to enjoy the strangeness for Sian, and to answer a question for Michael, and when the time came I’d be happy to bifurcate, and resume the two lives I remembered and valued.

So, how did I experience consciousness? The same way as Michael? The same way as Sian? So far as I could tell, I’d undergone no fundamental change—but even as I reached that conclusion, I began to wonder if I was in any position to judge. Did memories of being Michael, and memories of being Sian, contain so much more than the two of them could have put into words and exchanged verbally? Did I really know anything about the nature of their existence, or was my head just full of second-hand description—intimate, and detailed, but ultimately as opaque as language? If my mind were radically different, would that difference be something I could even perceive—or would all my memories, in the act of remembering, simply be recast into terms that seemed familiar?

The past, after all, was no more knowable than the external world. Its very existence also had to be taken on faith—and, granted existence, it too could be misleading.

I buried my head in my hands, dejected. I was the closest they could get, and what had come of me?

Michael’s hope remained precisely as reasonable—and as unproven—as ever. After a while, my mood began to lighten. At least Michael’s search was over, even if it had ended in failure. Now he’d have no choice but to accept that, and move on.

I paced around the room for a while, flicking the HV on and off. I was actually starting to get bored, but I wasn’t going to waste eight hours and several thousand dollars by sitting down and watching soap operas.

I mused about possible ways of undermining the synchronisation of my two copies. It was inconceivable that Bentley could have matched the rooms and bodies to such a fine tolerance that an engineer worthy of the name couldn’t find some way of breaking the symmetry. Even a coin toss might have done it, but I didn’t have a coin. Throwing a paper plane? That sounded promising—highly sensitive to air currents but the only paper in the room was the Escher, and I couldn’t bring myself to vandalise it. I might have smashed the mirror, and observed the shapes and sizes of the fragments, which would have had the added bonus of proving or disproving my earlier speculations, but as I raised the chair over my head, I suddenly changed my mind. Two conflicting sets of short-term memories had been confusing enough during a few minutes of sensory deprivation; for several hours interacting with a physical environment, it could be completely disabling. Better to hold off until I was desperate for amusement.

So I lay down on the bed and did what most of Bentley’s clients probably ended up doing.

As they coalesced, Sian and Michael had both had fears for their privacy—and both had issued compensatory, not to say defensive, mental declarations of frankness, not wanting the other to think that they had something to hide. Their curiosity, too, had been ambivalent; they’d wanted to understand each other, but, of course, not to pry.

All of these contradictions continued in me, but—staring at the ceiling, trying not to look at the clock again for at least another thirty seconds—I didn’t really have to make a decision. It was the most natural thing in the world to let my mind wander back over the course of their relationship, from both points of view.

It was a very peculiar reminiscence. Almost everything seemed at once vaguely surprising and utterly familiar—like an extended attack of déjà vu. It’s not that they’d often set out deliberately to deceive each other about anything substantial, but all the tiny white lies, all the concealed trivial resentments, all the necessary, laudable, essential, loving deceptions, that had kept them together in spite of their differences, filled my head with a strange haze of confusion and disillusionment.

It wasn’t in any sense a conversation; I was no multiple personality. Sian and Michael simply weren’t there—to justify, to explain, to deceive each other all over again, with the best intentions. Perhaps I should have attempted to do all this on their behalf, but I was constantly unsure of my role, unable to decide on a position. So I lay there, paralysed by symmetry, and let their memories flow.

After that, the time passed so quickly that I never had a chance to break the mirror. We tried to stay together.

We lasted a week.

Bentley had made—as the law required—snapshots of our jewels prior to the experiment. We could have gone back to them—and then had him explain to us why—but self-deception is only an easy choice if you make it in time.

We couldn’t forgive each other, because there was nothing to forgive. Neither of us had done a single thing that the other could fail to understand, and sympathise with, completely.

We knew each other too well, that’s all. Detail after tiny fucking microscopic detail. It wasn’t that the truth hurt; it didn’t, any longer. It numbed us. It smothered us. We didn’t know each other as we knew ourselves; it was worse than that. In the self, the details blur in the very processes of thought; mental self-dissection is possible, but it takes great effort to sustain. Our mutual dissection took no effort at all; it was the natural state into which we fell in each other’s presence. Our surfaces had been stripped away, but not to reveal a glimpse of the soul. All we could see beneath the skin were the cogs, spinning.

And I knew, now, that what Sian had always wanted most in a lover was the alien, the unknowable, the mysterious, the opaque. The whole point, for her, of being with someone else was the sense of confronting otherness. Without it, she believed, you might as well be talking to yourself.

I found that I now shared this view (a change whose precise origins I didn’t much want to think about… but then, I’d always known she had the stronger personality, I should have guessed that something would rub off).

Together, we might as well have been alone, so we had no choice but to part.

Nobody wants to spend eternity alone.

0 notes

fromprison2002 · 6 months

Text

Sci-fi

Unstable Orbits in the Space of Lies

GREG EGAN

I always feel safest sleeping on the freeway—or at least, those stretches of it that happen to lie in regions of approximate equilibrium between the surrounding attractors. With our sleeping bags laid out carefully along the fading white lines between the northbound lanes (perhaps because of a faint hint of geomancy reaching up from Chinatown—not quite drowned out by the influence of scientific humanism from the east, liberal Judaism from the west, and some vehement anti-spiritual, anti-intellectual hedonism from the north), I can close my eyes safe in the knowledge that Maria and I are not going to wake up believing, wholeheartedly and irrevocably, in Papal infallibility, the sentience of Gaia, the delusions of insight induced by meditation, or the miraculous healing powers of tax reform.

So when I wake to find the sun already clear of the horizon—and Maria gone—I don’t panic. No faith, no world view, no belief system, no culture, could have reached out in the night and claimed her. The borders of the basins of attraction do fluctuate, advancing and retreating by tens of metres daily—but it’s highly unlikely that any of them could have penetrated this far into our precious wasteland of anomie and doubt. I can’t think why she would have walked off and left me, without a word—but Maria does things, now and then, that I find wholly inexplicable. And vice versa. Even after a year together, we still have that.

I don’t panic—but I don’t linger, either. I don’t want to get too far behind. I rise to my feet, stretching, and try to decide which way she would have headed; unless the local conditions have changed since she departed, that should be much the same as asking where I want to go, myself.

The attractors can’t be fought, they can’t be resisted—but it’s possible to steer a course between them, to navigate the contradictions. The easiest way to start out is to make use of a strong, but moderately distant attractor to build up momentum—while taking care to arrange to be deflected at the last minute by a countervailing influence.

Choosing the first attractor—the belief to which surrender must be feigned—is always a strange business. Sometimes it feels, almost literally, like sniffing the wind, like following an external trail; sometimes it seems like pure introspection, like trying to determine ‘my own’ true beliefs… and sometimes the whole idea of making a distinction between these apparent opposites seems misguided. Yeah, very fucking Zen—and that’s how it strikes me now… which in itself just about answers the question. The balance here is delicate, but one influence is marginally stronger: Eastern philosophies are definitely more compelling than the alternatives, from where I stand—and knowing the purely geographical reasons for this doesn’t really make it any less true. I piss on the chain-link fence between the freeway and the railway line, to hasten its decay, then I roll up my sleeping bag, take a swig of water from my canteen, hoist my pack, and start walking.

A bakery’s robot delivery van speeds past me, and I curse my solitude: without elaborate preparations, it takes at least two agile people to make use of them: one to block the vehicle’s path, the other to steal the food. Losses through theft are small enough that the people of the attractors seem to tolerate them; presumably, greater security measures just aren’t worth the cost—although no doubt the inhabitants of each ethical monoculture have their own unique ‘reasons’ for not starving us amoral tramps into submission. I take out a sickly carrot which I dug from one of my vegetable gardens when I passed by last night; it makes a pathetic breakfast, but as I chew on it, I think about the bread rolls that I’ll steal when I’m back with Maria again, and my anticipation almost overshadows the bland, woody taste of the present.

The freeway curves gently south-east. I reach a section flanked by deserted factories and abandoned houses, and against this background of relative silence, the tug of Chinatown, straight ahead now, grows stronger and clearer. That glib label—‘Chinatown’—was always an oversimplification, of course; before Meltdown, the area contained at least a dozen distinct cultures besides Hong Kong and Malaysian Chinese, from Korean to Cambodian, from Thai to Timorese—and several varieties of every religion from Buddhism to Islam. All of that diversity has vanished now, and the homogeneous amalgam that finally stabilised would probably seem utterly bizarre to any individual pre-Meltdown inhabitant of the district. To the present-day citizens, of course, the strange hybrid feels exactly right; that’s the definition of stability, the whole reason the attractors exist. If I marched right into Chinatown, not only would I find myself sharing the local values and beliefs, I’d be perfectly happy to stay that way for the rest of my life.

I don’t expect that I’ll march right in, though—any more than I expect the Earth to dive straight into the Sun. It’s been almost four years since Meltdown, and no attractor has captured me yet.

* * *

I’ve heard dozens of ‘explanations’ for the events of that day, but I find most of them equally dubious—rooted as they are in the world-views of particular attractors. One way in which I sometimes think of it, on 12 January, 2018, the human race must have crossed some kind of unforeseen threshold—of global population, perhaps—and suffered a sudden, irreversible change of psychic state.

Telepathy is not the right word for it; after all, nobody found themself drowning in an ocean of babbling voices; nobody suffered the torment of empathic overload. The mundane chatter of consciousness stayed locked inside our heads; our quotidian mental privacy remained unbreached. (Or perhaps, as some have suggested, everyone’s mental privacy was so thoroughly breached that the sum of our transient thoughts forms a blanket of featureless white noise covering the planet, which the brain filters out effortlessly.)

In any case, for whatever reason, the second-by-second soap operas of other people’s inner lives remained, mercifully, as inaccessible as ever… but our skulls became completely permeable to each other’s values and beliefs, each other’s deepest convictions.

At first, this meant pure chaos. My memories of the time are confused and nightmarish; I wandered the city for a day and a night (I think), finding God (or some equivalent) anew every six seconds—seeing no visions, hearing no voices, but wrenched from faith to faith by invisible forces of dream logic. People moved in a daze, cowed and staggering—while ideas moved between us like lightning. Revelation followed contradictory revelation. I wanted it to stop, badly—I would have prayed for it to stop, if God had stayed the same long enough to be prayed to. I’ve heard other tramps compare these early mystical convulsions to drug rushes, to orgasms, to being picked up and dumped by ten-metre waves, ceaselessly, hour after hour—but looking back, I find myself reminded most of a bout of gastroenteritis I once suffered: a long, feverish night of interminable vomiting and diarrhoea. Every muscle, every joint in my body ached, my skin burned: I felt like I was dying. And every time I thought I lacked the strength to expel anything more from my body, another spasm took hold of me. By four in the morning, my helplessness seemed positively transcendental: the peristaltic reflex possessed me like some harsh—but ultimately benevolent—deity. At the time, it was the most religious experience I’d ever been through.

All across the city, competing belief systems fought for allegiance, mutating and hybridising along the way… like those random populations of computer viruses they used to unleash against each other in experiments to demonstrate subtle points of evolutionary theory. Or perhaps like the historical clashes of the very same beliefs—with the length and timescales drastically shortened by the new mode of interaction, and a lot less bloodshed, now that the ideas themselves could do battle in a purely mental arena, rather than employing sword-wielding Crusaders or extermination camps. Or, like a swarm of demons set loose upon the Earth to possess all but the righteous…

The chaos didn’t last long. In some places seeded by pre-Meltdown clustering of cultures and religions—and in other places, by pure chance—certain belief systems gained enough of an edge, enough of a foothold, to start spreading out from a core of believers into the surrounding random detritus, capturing adjacent, disordered populations where no dominant belief had yet emerged. The more territory these snowballing attractors conquered, the faster they grew. Fortunately—in this city, at least—no single attractor was able to expand unchecked: they all ended up hemmed in, sooner or later, by equally powerful neighbours—or confined by sheer lack of population at the city’s outskirts, and near voids of non-residential land.

Within a week of Meltdown, the anarchy had crystallised into more or less the present configuration, with ninety-nine per cent of the population having moved—or changed—until they were content to be exactly where—and who—they were.

I happened to end up between attractors—affected by many, but captured by none—and I’ve managed to stay in orbit ever since. Whatever the knack is, I seem to have it; over the years, the ranks of the tramps have thinned, but a core of us remains free.

In the early years, the people of the attractors used to send up robot helicopters to scatter pamphlets over the city, putting the case for their respective metaphors for what had happened—as if a well-chosen analogy for the disaster might be enough to win them converts; it took a while for some of them to understand that the written word had been rendered obsolete as a vector for indoctrination. Ditto for audiovisual techniques—and that still hasn’t sunk in everywhere. Not long ago, on a battery-powered TV set in an abandoned house, Maria and I picked up a broadcast from a network of rationalist enclaves, showing an alleged ‘simulation’ of Meltdown as a colour-coded dance of mutually carnivorous pixels, obeying a few simple mathematical rules. The commentator spouted jargon about self-organising systems—and lo, with the magic of hindsight, the flickers of colour rapidly evolved into the familiar pattern of hexagonal cells, isolated by moats of darkness (unpopulated except for the barely visible presence of a few unimportant specks; we wondered which ones were meant to be us).

I don’t know how things would have turned out if there hadn’t been the pre-existing infrastructure of robots and telecommunications to allow people to live and work without travelling outside their own basins—the regions guaranteed to lead back to the central attractor—most of which are only a kilometre or two wide. (In fact, there must be many places where that infrastructure wasn’t present, but I haven’t been exactly plugged into the global village these last few years, so I don’t know how they’ve fared.) Living on the margins of this society makes me even more dependent on its wealth than those who inhabit its multiple centres, so I suppose I should be glad that most people are content with the status quo—and I’m certainly delighted that they can co-exist in peace, that they can trade and prosper.

I’d rather die than join them, that’s all.

(Or at least, that’s true right here, right now.)

* * *

The trick is to keep moving, to maintain momentum. There are no regions of perfect neutrality—or if there are, they’re too small to find, probably too small to inhabit, and they’d almost certainly drift as the conditions within the basins varied. Near enough is fine for a night, but if I tried to live in one place, day after day, week after week, then whichever attractor held even the slightest advantage would, eventually, begin to sway me.

Momentum, and confusion. Whether or not it’s true that we’re spared each other’s inner voices because so much uncorrelated babbling simply cancels itself out, my aim is to do just that with the more enduring, more coherent, more pernicious parts of the signal. At the very centre of the Earth, no doubt, the sum of all human beliefs adds up to pure, harmless noise: here on the surface, though, where it’s physically impossible to be equidistant from everyone, I’m forced to keep moving to average out the effects as best I can.

Sometimes I daydream about heading out into the countryside, and living in glorious clear-headed solitude beside a robot-tended farm, stealing the equipment and supplies I need to grow all my own food. With Maria? If she’ll come; sometimes she says yes, sometimes she says no. Half a dozen times, we’ve told ourselves that we’re setting out on such a journey… but we’ve yet to discover a trajectory out of the city, a route that would take us safely past all the intervening attractors, without being gradually deflected back towards the urban centre. There must be a way out, it’s simply a matter of finding it—and if all the rumours from other tramps have turned out to be dead ends, that’s hardly surprising: the only people who could know for certain how to leave the city are those who’ve stumbled on the right path and actually departed, leaving no hints or rumours behind.

Sometimes, though, I stop dead in the middle of the road and ask myself what I ‘really want’:

To escape to the country, and lose myself in the silence of my own mute soul?

To give up this pointless wandering and rejoin civilisation? For the sake of prosperity, stability, certainty: to swallow, and be swallowed by, one elaborate set of self-affirming lies?

Or, to keep orbiting this way until I die?

The answer, of course, depends on where I’m standing.

* * *

More robot trucks pass me, but I no longer give them a second glance. I picture my hunger as an object—another weight to carry, not much heavier than my pack—and it gradually recedes from my attention. I let my mind grow blank, and I think of nothing but the early-morning sunshine on my face, and the pleasure of walking.

After a while, a startling clarity begins to wash over me; a deep tranquillity, together with a powerful sense of understanding. The odd part is, I have no idea what it is that I think I understand; I’m experiencing the pleasure of insight without any apparent cause, without the faintest hope of replying to the question: insight into what? The feeling persists, regardless.

I think: I’ve travelled in circles, all these years, and where has it brought me?

To this moment. To this chance to take my first real steps along the path to enlightenment.

And all I have to do is keep walking, straight ahead.

For four years, I’ve been following a false tao—pursuing an illusion of freedom, striving for no reason but the sake of striving—but now I see the way to transform that journey into—

Into what? A short cut to damnation?

‘Damnation’? There’s no such thing. Only samsara, the treadmill of desires. Only the futility of striving. My understanding is clouded, now—but I know that if I travelled a few steps further, the truth would soon become clear to me.

For several seconds, I’m paralysed by indecision—shot through with pure dread—but then, drawn by the possibility of redemption, I leave the freeway, clamber over the fence, and head due south.

These side streets are familiar. I pass a car yard full of sun-bleached wrecks melting in slow motion, their plastic chassis triggered by disuse into autodegradation; a video porn and sex-aids shop, façade intact, dark within, stinking of rotting carpet and mouse shit; an outboard motor showroom, the latest four-year-old—fuel cell models proudly on display already looking like bizarre relics from another century.

Then the sight of the cathedral spire rising above all this squalor hits me with a giddy mixture of nostalgia and déjà vu. In spite of everything, part of me still feels like a true Prodigal Son, coming home for the first time—not passing through for the fiftieth. I mumble prayers and phrases of dogma, strangely comforting formulae reawakened from memories of my last perihelion.

Soon, only one thing puzzles me: how could I have known God’s perfect love—and then walked away?

It’s unthinkable. How could I have turned my back on Him?

I come to a row of pristine houses: I know they’re uninhabited, but here in the border zone the diocesan robots keep the lawns trimmed, the leaves swept, the walls painted. A few blocks further, south-west, and I’ll never turn my back on the truth again. I head that way, gladly.

Almost gladly.

The only trouble is… with each step south it grows harder to ignore the fact that the scriptures—let alone Catholic dogma—are full of the most grotesque errors of fact and logic. Why should a revelation from a perfect, loving God be such a dog’s breakfast of threats and contradictions? Why should it offer such a flawed and confused view of humanity’s place in the universe?

Errors of fact? The metaphors had to be chosen to suit the world-view of the day; should God have mystified the author of Genesis with details of the Big Bang, and primordial nucleosynthesis?

Contradictions? Tests of faith—and humility. How can I be so arrogant as to set my wretched powers of reasoning against the Word of the Almighty? God transcends everything, logic included.

Logic especially.

It’s no good. Virgin births? Miracles with loaves and fishes? Resurrection? Poetic fables only, not to be taken literally? If that’s the case, though, what’s left but a few well-intentioned homilies, and a lot of pompous theatrics? If God did in fact become man, suffer, die, and rise again to save me, then I owe Him everything… but if it’s just a beautiful story, then I can love my neighbour with or without regular doses of bread and wine.

I veer south-east.

The truth about the universe (here) is infinitely stranger, and infinitely more grand: it lies in the Laws of Physics that have come to know Themselves through humanity. Our destiny and purpose are encoded in the fine structure constant, and the value of the density omega. The human race—in whatever form, robot or organic—will keep on advancing for the next ten billion years, until we can give rise to the hyperintelligence which will cause the finely tuned Big Bang required to bring us into existence.

If we don’t die out in the next few millennia.

In which case, other intelligent creatures will perform the task. It doesn’t matter who carries the torch.

Exactly. None of it matters. Why should I care what a civilisation of posthumans, robots, or aliens, might or might not do ten billion years from now? What does any of this grandiose shit have to do with me?

I finally catch sight of Maria, a few blocks ahead of me—and right on cue, the existentialist attractor to the west firmly steers me away from the suburbs of cosmic baroque. I increase my pace, but only slightly—it’s too hot to run, but more to the point, sudden acceleration can have some peculiar side effects, bringing on unexpected philosophical swerves.

As I narrow the gap, she turns at the sound of my footsteps.

I say, ‘Hi.’

‘Hi.’ She doesn’t seem exactly thrilled to see me—but then, this isn’t exactly the place for it.

I fall into step beside her. ‘You left without me.’

She shrugs. ‘I wanted to be on my own for a while. I wanted to think things over.’

I laugh. ‘If you wanted to think, you should have stayed on the freeway.’

‘There’s another spot ahead. In the park. It’s just as good.’

She’s right—although now I’m here to spoil it for her. I ask myself for the thousandth time: Why do I want us to stay together? Because of what we have in common? But we owe most of that to the very fact that we are together—travelling the same paths, corrupting each other with our proximity. Because of our differences, then? For the sake of occasional moments of mutual incomprehensibility? But the longer we’re together, the more that vestige of mystery will be eroded; orbiting each other can only lead to a spiralling together, an end to all distinctions.

Why, then?

The honest answer (here and now) is: food and sex—although tomorrow, elsewhere, no doubt I’ll look back and brand that conclusion a cynical lie.

I fall silent as we drift towards the equilibrium zone. The last few minutes’ confusion still rings in my head, satisfyingly jumbled, the giddy succession of truncated epiphanies effectively cancelling each other out, leaving nothing behind but an amorphous sense of distrust. I remember a school of thought from pre-Meltdown days which proclaimed, with bovine good intentions—confusing laudable tolerance with sheer credulity—that there was something of value in every human philosophy… and what’s more, when you got right down to it, they all really spoke the same ‘universal truths’, and were all, ultimately, reconcilable. Apparently, none of these supine ecumenicists have survived to witness the palpable disproof of their hypothesis; I expect they all converted, three seconds after Meltdown, to the faith of whoever was standing closest to them at the time.

Maria mutters angrily, ‘Wonderful!’ I look up at her, then follow her gaze. The park has come into view, and if it’s time to herself she wanted, she has more than me to contend with. At least two dozen other tramps are gathered in the shade. That’s rare, but it does happen; equilibrium zones are the slowest parts of everybody’s orbits, so I suppose it’s not surprising that occasionally a group of us ends up becalmed together.

As we come closer, I notice something stranger: everybody reclining on the grass is facing the same way. Watching something—or someone—hidden from view by the trees.

Someone. A woman’s voice reaches us, the words indistinct at this distance, but the tone mellifluous. Confident. Gentle but persuasive.

Maria says nervously, ‘Maybe we should stay back. Maybe the equilibrium’s shifted.’

‘Maybe.’ I’m as worried as she is—but intrigued as well. I don’t feel much of a tug from any of the familiar local attractors—but then, I can’t be sure that my curiosity itself isn’t a new hook for an old idea.

I say, ‘Let’s just… skirt around the rim of the park. We can’t ignore this; we have to find out what’s going on.’ If a nearby basin has expanded and captured the park, then keeping our distance from the speaker is no guarantee of freedom; it’s not her words, or her lone presence, that could harm us—but Maria (knowing all this, I’m sure) accepts my ‘strategy’ for warding off the danger, and nods assent.

We position ourselves in the middle of the road at the eastern edge of the park, without noticeable effect. The speaker, middle-aged I’d guess, looks every inch a tramp, from the dirt-stiff clothes to the crudely cut hair to the weathered skin and lean build of a half-starved perennial walker. Only the voice is wrong. She’s set up a frame, like an easel, on which she’s stretched a large map of the city; the roughly hexagonal cells of the basins are neatly marked in a variety of colours. People used to swap maps like this all the time, in the early years; maybe she’s just showing off her prize possession, hoping to trade it for something worthwhile. I don’t think much of her chances; by now, I’m sure, every tramp relies on his or her own mental picture of the ideological terrain.

Then she lifts a pointer and traces part of a feature I’d missed: a delicate web of blue lines, weaving through the gaps between the hexagons.

The woman says, ‘But of course it’s no accident. We haven’t stayed out of the basins all these years by sheer good luck—or even skill.’ She looks out across the crowd, notices us, pauses a moment, then says calmly, ‘We’ve been captured by our own attractor. It’s nothing like the others—it’s not a fixed set of beliefs, in a fixed location—but it’s still an attractor, it’s still drawn us to it from whatever unstable orbits we might have been on. I’ve mapped it—or part of it—and I’ve sketched it as well as I can. The true detail may be infinitely fine—but even from this crude representation, you should recognise paths that you’ve walked yourselves.’

I stare at the map. From this distance, the blue strands are impossible to follow individually; I can see that they cover the route that Maria and I have taken, over the last few days, but—

An old man calls out, ‘You’ve scrawled a lot of lines between the basins. What does that prove?’

‘Not between all the basins.’ She touches a point on the map. ‘Has anyone ever been here? Or here? Or here? No? Here? Or here? Why not? They’re all wide corridors between attractors—they look as safe as any of the others. So why have we never been to these places? For the same reason nobody living in the fixed attractors has: they’re not part of our territory; they’re not part of our own attractor.’

I know she’s talking nonsense, but the phrase alone is enough to make me feel panicky, claustrophobic. Our own attractor. We’ve been captured by our own attractor. I scan the rim of the city on the map; the blue line never comes close to it. In fact, the line gets about as far from the centre as I’ve ever travelled, myself…

Proving what? Only that this woman has had no better luck than I have. If she’d escaped the city, she wouldn’t be here to claim that escape was impossible.

A woman in the crowd—visibly pregnant—says, ‘You’ve drawn your own paths, that’s all. You’ve stayed out of danger—I’ve stayed out of danger—we all know what places to avoid. That’s all you’re telling us. That’s all we have in common.’

‘No!’ The speaker traces a stretch of the blue line again. ‘This is who we are. We’re not aimless wanderers; we’re the people of this strange attractor. We have an identity—a unity—after all.’

There’s laughter, and a few desultory insults from the crowd. I whisper to Maria, ‘Do you know her? Have you see her before?’

‘I’m not sure. I don’t think so.’

‘You wouldn’t have. Isn’t it obvious? She’s some kind of robot evangelist—’

‘She doesn’t talk much like one.’

‘Rationalist—not Christian or Mormon.’

‘Rationalists don’t send evangelists.’

‘No? Mapping strange attractors; if that’s not rationalist jargon, what is it?’

Maria shrugs. ‘Basins, attractors—they’re all rationalist words, but everybody uses them. You know what they say: the Devil has the best tunes, but the rationalists have the best jargon. Words have to come from somewhere.’

The woman says, ‘I’ll build my church on sand. And I’ll ask no one to follow me—and yet, you will. You all will.’

I say, ‘Let’s go.’ I take Maria’s arm, but she pulls free angrily.

‘Why are you so against her? Maybe she’s right.’

‘Are you crazy?’

‘Everyone else has an attractor—why can’t we have one of our own? Stranger than all the rest. Look at it: it’s the most beautiful thing on the map.’

I shake my head, horrified. ‘How can you say that? We’ve stayed free. We’ve struggled so hard to stay free.’

She shrugs. ‘Maybe. Or maybe we’ve been captured by what you call freedom. Maybe we don’t need to struggle any more. Is that so bad? If we’re doing what we want, either way, why should we care?’

Without any fuss, the woman starts packing up her easel, and the crowd of tramps begins to disperse. Nobody seems to have been much affected by the brief sermon; everyone heads off calmly on their own chosen orbits.

I, say, ‘The people in the basins are doing what they want. I don’t want to be like them.’

Maria laughs. ‘Believe me, you’re not.’

‘No, you’re right, I’m not: they’re rich, fat and complacent; I’m starving, tired, and confused. And for what? Why am I living this way? That robot’s trying to take away the one thing that makes it all worthwhile.’

‘Yeah? Well, I’m tired and hungry, too. And maybe an attractor of my own will make it all worthwhile.’

‘How?’ I laugh derisively. ‘Will you worship it? Will you pray to it?’

‘No. But I won’t have to be afraid any more. If we really have been captured—if the way we live is stable, after all—then putting one foot wrong won’t matter: we’ll be drawn back to our own attractor. We won’t have to worry that the smallest mistake will send us sliding into one of the basins. If that’s true, aren’t you glad?’

I shake my head angrily. ‘That’s bullshit—dangerous bullshit. Staying out of the basins is a skill, it’s a gift. You know that. We navigate the channels, carefully, balancing the opposing forces—’

‘Do we? I’m sick of feeling like a tightrope walker.’

‘Being sick of it doesn’t mean it isn’t true! Don’t you see? She wants us to be complacent! The more of us who start to think orbiting is easy, the more of us will end up captured by the basins—’

I’m distracted by the sight of the prophet hefting her possessions and setting off. I say, ‘Look at her: she may be a perfect imitation—but she’s a robot, she’s a fake. They’ve finally understood that their pamphlets and their preaching machines won’t work, so they’ve sent a machine to lie to us about our freedom.’

Maria says, ‘Prove it.’

‘What?’

‘You’ve got a knife. If she’s a robot, go after her, stop her, cut her open. Prove it.’

The woman, the robot, crosses the park, heading north-west, away from us. I say, ‘You know me; I could never do that.’

‘If she’s a robot, she won’t feel a thing.’

‘But she looks human. I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t stick a knife into a perfect imitation of human flesh.’

‘Because you know she’s not a robot. You know she’s telling the truth.’

Part of me is simply glad to be arguing with Maria, for the sake of proving our separateness—but part of me finds everything she’s saying too painful to leave unchallenged.

I hesitate a moment, then put down my pack and sprint across the park towards the prophet.

She turns when she hears me, and stops walking. There’s no one else nearby. I halt a few metres away from her, and catch my breath. She regards me with patient curiosity. I stare at her, feeling increasingly foolish. I can’t pull a knife on her: she might not be a robot, after all—she might just be a tramp with strange ideas.

She says, ‘Did you want to ask me something?’

Almost without thinking, I blurt out, ‘How do you know nobody’s ever left the city? How can you be so sure it’s never happened?’

She shakes her head. ‘I didn’t say that. The attractor looks like a closed loop to me. Anyone who’s been captured by it could never leave. But other people may have escaped.’

‘What other people?’

‘People who weren’t in the attractor’s basin.’

I scowl, confused. ‘What basin? I’m not talking about the people of the basins, I’m talking about us.’

She laughs. ‘I’m sorry. I don’t mean the basins that lead to the fixed attractors. Our strange attractor has a basin, too: all the points that lead to it. I don’t know what this basin’s shape is: like the attractor itself, the detail could be infinitely fine. Not every point in the gaps between the hexagons would be part of it: some points must lead to the fixed attractors—that’s why some tramps have been captured by them. Other points would belong to the strange attractor’s basin. But others—’

‘What?’

‘Other points might lead to infinity. To escape.’

‘Which points?’

She shrugs. ‘Who knows? There could be two points, side by side, one leading into the strange attractor, one leading—eventually—out of the city. The only way to find out which is which would be to start at each point, and see what happens.’

‘But you said we’d all been captured, already—’

She nods. ‘After so many orbits, the basins must have emptied into their respective attractors. The attractors are the stable part: the basins lead into the attractors, but the attractors lead into themselves. Anyone who was destined for a fixed attractor must be in it by now—and anyone who was destined to leave the city has already gone. Those of us who are still in orbit will stay that way. We have to understand that, accept that, learn to live with it… and if that means inventing our own faith, our own religion—’

I grab her arm, draw my knife, and quickly scrape the point across her forearm. She yelps and pulls free, then clasps her hand to the wound. A moment later, she takes it away to inspect the damage, and I see the thin red line on her arm, and a rough wet copy on her palm.

‘You lunatic!’ she yells, backing away.

Maria approaches us. The probably-flesh-and-blood prophet addresses her: ‘He’s mad! Get him off me!’ Maria takes hold of my arm, then, inexplicably, leans towards me and puts her tongue in my ear. I burst out laughing. The woman steps back uncertainly, then turns and hurries away.

Maria says, ‘Not much of a dissection—but as far as it went, it was in my favour. I win.’

I hesitate, then feign surrender.

‘You win.’

* * *

By nightfall, we end up on the freeway again; this time, to the east of the city centre. We gaze at the sky above the black silhouette of abandoned office towers, our brains mildly scrambled by the residual effects of a nearby cluster of astrologers, as we eat the day’s prize catch: a giant vegetarian pizza.

Finally, Maria says, ‘Venus has set. I think I ought to sleep now.’

I nod. ‘I’ll wait up for Mars.’

Traces of the day’s barrage drift through my mind, more or less at random—but I can still recall most of what the woman in the park told me.

After so many orbits, the basins must have emptied…

So by now, we’ve all ended up captured. But—how could she know that? How could she be sure?

And what if she’s wrong? What if we haven’t all, yet, arrived in our final resting place?

The astrologers say: None of her filthy, materialist, reductionist lies can be true. Except the ones about destiny. We like destiny. Destiny is fine.

I get up and walk a dozen metres south, neutralising their contribution. Then I turn and watch Maria sleeping.

There could be two points, side by side, one leading into the strange attractor, one leading—eventually—out of the city. The only way to find out which is which would be to start at each point, and see what happens.

Right now, everything she said sounds to me like some heavily distorted and badly misunderstood rationalist model. And here I am, grasping at hope by seizing on half of her version, and throwing out the rest. Metaphors mutating and hybridising, all over again…

I walk over to Maria, crouch down and bend to kiss her, gently, upside down on the forehead. She doesn’t even stir.

Then I lift my pack and set off down the freeway, believing for a moment that I can feel the emptiness beyond the city reach through, reach over, all the obstacles ahead, and claim me.

0 notes

fromprison2002 · 6 months

Text

Fiction

The Photography Critic

Hervé Guibert

Before writing an article, he would engage in obsessive preparation: brush his teeth, wash his hands, attempt to defecate, wash his hands again right before grabbing the sheet of paper. Usually, to eliminate any tempting distractions, he would masturbate, empty himself, perforate himself, make a clean slate of his body.

Two or three times a week, he went to the newspaper office to retrieve his mail from a little gray pigeonhole with his name on it. He immediately threw away the envelopes, which only ever contained prints from galleries alerting him of their upcoming exhibitions. Thus, several times a week, he felt summoned. His books wouldn’t reach him, having been stolen.

He never went to vernissages: he dreaded being attacked, and deep down he must have had a certain scorn for the people he might have encountered there. Out of a kind of paranoia typical of his newspaper, he gladly refrained from attending. His name remained mysterious.

He knew that he was being paid to empty himself. That his energy was being diverted into this civil service of writing. When his spirits were at their lowest, he would imagine he was an amphibian pinned to a cork board, half dead, still twitching from the occasional electric shock. Rarely did anything in photography provoke him, resuscitate him, arouse in him any jolts of writing. And yet, even if he had nothing to say, he still had to give an account: he worked for a daily and was paid per article.

Out of a perhaps idiotic sense of integrity, he traveled to wherever he was summoned, even to those exhibitions too insignificant to merit attention. And when he had to review a book, he read it to the last line, even if doing so didn’t interest him or benefit his article in the slightest. As a matter of principle, he never inserted quotations: bored by recopying, he told himself that his word was as good as another’s.

Sometimes, when he was intimidated by the length of the article he had to write—or when his subject was too unfamiliar to him—he did research, read supplementary materials and took notes on them. But the mass of accumulated material hampered him, blew away his own ideas: he didn’t know how to integrate it. Thus, he often preferred to remain ignorant, for fear that his writing would be blocked and he would feel himself becoming a pathetic drudge. He was determined to preserve his pleasure.

When he went into a gallery, the first thing he did was take a quick look at everything. Then, almost systematically, he took notes. He went back to each photo and described its visible elements and, more rarely, his impressions of it. Taking notes allowed him to leave his memory vacant until the writing of the article. He was afraid of remembering all these images that he often didn’t like.

When the time came to write the article—often to get it out of the way, because he didn’t feel like writing it—he took his notes and immediately transcribed them. There were always objects and details in the image that told him something, joined forces with his own imagination. His articles were reproached for being merely descriptive, and verbose.

Just as often, he didn’t reread his notes. He felt confident about his object of critique, which he no longer described, but instead took apart, assuming a position of intelligence (of impunity?).

Some nights, he woke up with a fatigue of images in his head, an insomniac presence of images running idle, having replaced words (he hadn’t dreamt in sentences for a long time). The images were neither horrifying nor precise: it was the very fact that his head was filled with images (as opposed to bodies and scenery, as it should have been), as well as the sense of obligation to put them into words, that triggered the nightmare. A civil servant’s nightmare, in short.

He wasn’t sure what drove people to photograph things so frantically, brandishing a camera between themselves and others, between themselves and situations. What he understood and respected the most were family photos and erotic photos. They weren’t pretentious, and they could support various affections and desires. Otherwise, photography mostly seemed to be an activity for the lazy and smug.

Before each article, he experienced a moment of anguish, of mild torture. He knew that at the same time the next day, his article would already be in the paper, and often he didn’t know yet what it would consist of. The rapid interval between the idea and the publication frightened him (and so many stages escaped him: the typesetting and copyediting, the page layout, the printing). There was always a certain risk, a risk of the impunity of the newspaper overseeing the article, a sort of responsibility.

Day after day he stacked newspapers between the trestles of his work table. Sometimes he went through them and clipped out his articles, which he then placed in a folder. But he never reread them.

He lamented the fact that he didn’t receive more letters, whether scathing or supportive.

When writing an article, he almost always felt like he was missing out on the article he could have written. The article only became acceptable once it was typed, when he was rid of it.

He owned a small camera (a Rollei 35) that would have made him a laughingstock of the profession that posed him as its critic. He found technique to be something overhyped by camera salesmen; he thought that a good face or object was enough to constitute a subject; he viewed more advanced cameras as mere fetish objects, like writers’ Montblanc pens. He never happened to take his camera out into the street and be struck by something, then capture it. Waiting for just the right moment would have seemed to him a waste of time. But he loved photographing the faces and bodies of those he loved. And sometimes, when he did intend to stay in one place for a while to tackle an idea (scars on people’s faces, fifteen-year-old boys with their mothers, cadavers in the morgue), he would quickly abandon it, discouraged, bored by the process and the logistics.

He lived off the economy of his body. After putting it deliberately to bed, he would annihilate it, as it were, when he forced himself to wake up early to write an article. And this was what displeased him: to be—just like a laborer—a producing machine, with even his body brought to heel, his sleep transformed into a positive, mechanical phase of work, a sort of battery, a rejection of sensual pleasure.

It became a vicious circle: when he was supposed to write an article, he would begin desiring to write for himself, and once the article was written, he was already thinking about the next one. All he ever wrote in his diary were notes, which grew shorter and shorter.

In the middle of an article he found easy to write, he suddenly desired to go haywire, to make himself sick, to complicate the writing, which for him could not be self-evident, so he frantically consumed, like poison, some Christmas chocolates.

When he had to write an article on the photos of August Sander, he came down with a fever, likely triggered by the impossibility of writing it. He was impressed by the perfection of these photos, by the madness of Sander’s project, which had consisted in attempting to establish in interwar Germany a sort of social nomenclature connected to morphological types. Unable to sleep, he wrote and rewrote the article, stumbling over turns of phrase. When a courier arrived at seven the next morning, he was still in front of his typewriter.

Just as there was an attempt at “objectivity” in Sander’s photos, he wanted to bring the same objectivity to his essay, by providing biographical details and defining the type of work in a simple manner. But on rereading the published article a few days later, his fever having broken, he found in it all the terms of his illness and his solitude, and realized that through these photos, which were nevertheless foreign to him, he had spoken only of himself.

__________________

These biographical notes were drawn up according to the recovered diary of Paul K., as well as his articles on photography published in Die Zeit between 1950 and 1955. (H.G.)

0 notes

fromprison2002 · 6 months

Text

Short Story

MY LITTLE PYROMANIAC

Mary Costello

I had not thought of S. for a long time. then, one evening last summer just after I’d moved in here, he came walking out of the house next door. I was getting out of my car and there was just enough time for each of us to acknowledge the other, the way new neighbours do, before he got into his own car. I walked to my front door, holding myself carefully, aware of the woman and children coming behind him, then the thunk of car doors closing.

I stood in my hall, picturing the car moving along the street, the woman – his wife? – beside him, the boy and girl in the back: he, silent at the wheel, confounded by the sight of me after all these years, and the realization that I was now living next door. And the thought that, from now on, we might, at any given moment, be only a few feet from each other, standing in our symmetrically positioned kitchen or bedrooms

All the houses in this cul-de-sac are semi-detached, inhabited mostly by families with young children or teenagers. In the evenings the cars roll in, spilling out tired adults, children dragging coats and bags, sports gear, musical instruments. one evening, the little girl next door hopped out of S’s car, dressed in a tutu. Her mother leaned into the back seat and took the child’s bag and carried it into the house. She is a small, dark-haired woman, and appears to be much younger than S. The boy is about ten, the girl perhaps seven. I have watched them closely — I am not entirely convinced these are S’s children.

When I was nineteen and still at university I fell in love with S. He was thirty-eight. He had a handsome, hewn face, a little like Warren Beatty's. He worked for a large investments company and lived in a beautiful Victorian redbrick with lamp-lit rooms and stained-glass panels in the front door. He was often abroad on business and sometimes a week or two would go by before I heard from him. Then we would meet and, if it suited him, I would stay over.

He would drop me off at college in his big car the next morning on his way to work or to the airport. Before I got out, I'd wait for him to say when we were to meet again. But he never did, and I carried a sickly feeling of loss and injury around with me all day.‘I’d let a few days pass and then I'd dial his number at night and listen to the ringing at the other end, imagining the street light shining in his front door and the lovely ivory Bakelite on the hall table echoing eerily through the house. Then, finally, a night would come when he would answer, and there would be a little pause after I said my name. He'd invite me over but I would hesitate, say that I had lectures in the morning. I had to show some restraint. I was afraid he would catch something in my voice or that even the Bakelite would betray me.

After we ended, I used to think I saw him coming towards me on the street, or entering, with other men in suits, expensive basement restaurants on St Stephen’s Green at lunchtime on Fridays. Or, in more recent times, at the airport, when I’d come on those high shoe-shine chairs on the way to the departure gates and have to do a double take, thinking it was S sitting up there reading his newspaper while a young man polished his shoes. Once, about ten years ago, I was standing at a busy intersection near my apartment, trying to hail a taxi into town. It was a Thursday evening and darkness was falling, and all the passing taxis were occupied. I stood at the edge of the kerb to get the best view in all directions. Once or twice I met the eyes of car drivers as they slowed to turn left. Then a large, dark jeep, a Range Rover, approached. There was something tentative about the way it slowed and something familiar about the shape of the driver that made my heart jump. I was sure it was him. I tried not to look, but as it drew level the passenger window slid down and the man’s eyes met mine. It was not S. The man looked directly into my eyes, strangely, intently, and then suddenly I knew what he wanted. He was propositioning me. I shrank back and turned and hurried along the footpath to a bus stop, with nothing left in my legs but terror. At the bus shelter I checked myself: my jeans and leather jacket, my shirt, my boots. What was it about me? Were my jeans too tight, was my hair too bright? Was I standing too close to the kerb? Is there a line, a demarcation point, beyond which a woman standing on a kerb will be mistaken for a hooker?

I keep well back from kerbs now. My attachment to such shame still troubles me. It could have been him. There was something about S — an arrogance, an authority, a furtiveness, too. He was a man used to getting his own way, a man who might send out secret signs and demands to women, and expect them to acquiesce.

On a Sunday in November, a few months in, the relationship ended. I had cycled over to his house, bearing steaks and wine in my rucksack. He was out hiking in the Wicklow Mountains and had left a key under a stone for me. I mooched around the rooms, opened drawers, touched his folded jumpers. I stood at his kitchen window and looked out at the old tree and the wrought iron seat in the garden. I thought of him coming off the mountains, steadying himself against the car as he pulled off his boots, the damp and exhaustion of the day lodged in his bones, then the drive back to the city. I had a vision of the evening ahead, the steak and the wine, our conversation, and something in me exalted.

I tried to light a fire but it wouldn't take. I found a drum of petrol in the shed, that he kept for his lawnmower. In my youth I had seen my brother and his friends light bonfires with petrol, so I built a pyre of coal and rolled-up newspapers in the grate. I held the drum carefully but still the petrol splashed, and, when I set a match to the pyre, tongues of fire blazed up and leapt out at me, whipping at my legs, igniting the droplets of fuel on the rug, on the armrest of the sofa. I ran from the room, from the fireballs that erupted behind me, beating:out a little flame on the leg of my jeans as I went.

The sound of crackling kindle still unnerves me, the mortification still scorches. For a long time I dreamt of little fires breaking out all over the place — in my shopping basket as I roamed supermarket aisles, in the nest of my piled-up hair, on my ring finger. I read somewhere that arsonists get an erotic charge and even sexual gratification from lighting fires. I can understand that — that moment of near annihilation, the juncture of sex and death, Eros and ‘Thanatos. They like to watch fire for its beauty too, its aesthetic value. Once, I woke up on S’s sofa to find him watching me. He touched my cheek lightly, delicately. I was greatly moved. There must have been other moments of kindness and tenderness too. Such moments would be worth having now, worth remembering.

I ran out of his house that day and rapped on the neighbour's door. The man — his name was Kevin — came and put out the little fires with wet towels. Then he stood and inspected the room, and finally looked at me. A huge fire engine turned the corner onto the street at that moment and sent blue light strobes around the room.

In a frenzy of fear and adrenaline, I washed down the walls and doors, wiped all the surfaces. I draped my cardigan over the armrest of the sofa. When he came in, he never noticed a thing. He kissed me in the kitchen, and went upstairs to shower. Later, I handed him a glass of wine and served up the steaks, and afterwards we carried our glasses to the front room. He sniffed the air and threw coal on the fire and it was this — the way he aimed the scuttle at the flames — that got to me, and I blurted out the whole story.

I broke down. He will kneel now, I thought, and hold me and examine my hands and ensure that I am unharmed. But he did not move. My gaze fell to his feet and I got a sudden flashback of the flames licking at my heels and the hand of death on my back. He came and sat beside me and I thought of the city and the dark night around us and I was filled with shame, and I couldn’t wait to flee that house. He leaned in and stroked my hair and whispered, “My little pyromaniac, and then he kissed me.

In those first days after seeing him last summer, I kept an account of his Comings and goings. The thought of meeting him again paralysed me. I rehearsed a few banal words to say — about what a small world it really is, and how little he had changed in twenty years. But weeks went by, and then months, and we did not meet. It is astonishing how people can live in such close quarters and yet remain remote from one another. We passed in the street, sequestered behind the windscreens of our cars. We wheeled our bins, parallel to each other, out our driveways on Sunday nights. Then, gradually, as the months passed, something shifted. The heightened state of anxiety and anticipation in which I had held myself slowly dissipated. Aided by him, I think. By some understanding in him — and consideration for those around him, perhaps even, for me — an understanding with which I would not previously have credited him.

He smokes now — I’ve seen the glow of his cigarette in the garden at night. Years ago he kept an inhaler on his bathroom shelf, for occasional use only, he told me. He did not seem, at the time, the kind of person who might suffer from asthma. I have known asthma sufferers — they are delicate, uncertain, sometimes stunted. One evening last autumn I watched him carry in the shopping bags and felt an appalling rush of affection for him. For his slow deliberate movements and his: ordinariness.. Devoid of the big house and car and the trappings of his previous lifestyle, some power has been divested of him. Whatever the cause of his comedown in the world — whatever bad luck or financial loss he suffered — he has transmuted: his circumstances and is changed. In some obscure inner place, in the limbic part of himself maybe, he is changed. As if his soul has slowly awoken and shown itself in all its quietude. Or perhaps it is my soul that has shown itself in all its subtler reflections.

I work from home now. I am a freelance copyeditor and I spend my days in an upstairs room at the back of my house poring over manuscripts, sent to me electronically by publishers. I love the close engagement with a text. I love the fine anatomy of a perfectly constructed sentence. I print out each manuscript, read slowly, insert, on almost every page, semi-colons, commas, dashes, line breaks. So many punctuation marks shunned or misplaced, nowadays, that I hold myself in readiness — tense, rigid, nervous — anticipating the transgressions. Commas, for some reason, fare the worst. Their neglect almost grieves me. The spaces where they rightfully belong beckon to me and I feel each space’s ache for the tiny symbol, the cypher that gives form to a pause, a faint intake of breath, a remembrance.

These days I'm copyediting a novel. — described as dystopian by the publisher — set in a post-apocalyptic Irish landscape. Not far into the novel, a gang of youths travel out of a ravaged city at night. Deep in the desolate countryside they enter a field where a flock of sheep and lambs are huddled together in the dark. The youths move quietly, stealthily. They herd the flock into a corner and slaughter the lambs, and skin them, there, in front of the mothers. Then they exit, carrying the warm bodies by the forelegs, leaving the mothers to sniff the steaming pelts and severed heads scattered on the ground. This is what hunger will do to men, the writer seems to be saying. Hunger will make savages of decent men.

From my desk I have a view onto my garden and the gardens on either side, and, of course, the sky. The weather has been subject to sudden change this summer — cloud formations in chrome and magnesium shadow the ground some days. Then, wheeling skies and downpours, even lightning. There is something elemental about living in a property of ry own, moored to one particular piece of ground on this earth, that I had not experienced before, that I had not reckoned upon before moving in here.

S keeps a dog, a German shepherd that constantly paces the perimeter of the garden. She drags her limbs round and round on the worn grass, then throws herself down in a corner. I know her habits now, the pattern of her rising and pacing and resting. She stands out in the rain and the lightning — there is no kennel. Occasionally, I take a kitchen stool into my garden and stand on it and lean over the wall.

The dog rises on her hind legs and wags her tail and whines. There, there, | say. | stroke her paws, her overgrown toenails. I feed her slices of bread and butter. I bring her water. She pricks up her ears at every sound — S’s car turning into the cul-de-sac in the evenings, the doors slamming, voices in the house. She wags her tail when the little girl comes out, and the little girl wags her index finger, orders the dog to sit, stand, lie. She drags her around by the collar, presses down on the small of the dog’s back, tries to straddle her. Bold-dog, bold-dog, she says, in a staccato voice, if the dog moves, then slaps the dog in the face. Bold-dog, slap-slap.

In the afternoons I drive to Sandymount and walk along the strand until I reach the rocks. I come only when the tide is far out. Proximity to a high tide or a swelling ocean induces a kind of vertigo in me, an uneasy feeling that I will be pulled in, swallowed up, brought far from any shore. But I love the cry of seagulls and the salt air. As I walk, I ponder the text I’m working on, turning over in my mind a particular clause or sentence that gnawed earlier. I meet elderly couples, dog-walkers of all ages. Day after day, I see the same faces. I feel immense tenderness for old people, for their pale melancholy eyes, their thin wrinkled skin, their diminished stature. I see them again on nearby streets as I drive away, re-entering houses, returning to routines that keep time and death and the disquiet of twilight at bay. There is an old man with whom I sometimes exchange a few words. He is tall, white-haired, patrician — I do not know his name or anything about him. One of his dogs is called Laika. She is named after the dog sent into space on Sputnik 2 in 1957 —a stray from the Moscow streets, chosen for the project because of her placid nature, he told me. I found her photograph on the internet — she is strapped into a leather harness just before take-off, her eyes eae and shining, her ears pricked up.

The moon is huge these nights, a supermoon, the weatherman says, an optical illusion. If I mute my TV, I can hear S’s through the living room walls. Ad jingles, the signature tune of the news. Last night I watched the pounding of Gaza by Fl6s, trolleys racing along hospital corridors, ribbons of shrapnel on the faces of children. After midnight I climbed the stairs and looked out my bedroom window at the moon. What are you doing to the tides tonight? I wondered. Pulling all of Earth’s energy to you, causing an exodus of vitality? I thought of S on the other side of the wall, his head next to his wife’s, his children asleep nearby. If this is his wife, if these are his children. I lay down and thought about the simultaneous existence of our private lives, and how we each slip into our private sleep, visited by dreams and fragments from the past, and how the same darkness, the same night, envelops us both and yet there is no name for what any of this is. There is nothing to explain how we — humans — can, one minute, lie down and reveal our most secret vulnerable selves to each other, greet the other’s soul in the sex act, and then, the next minute, or the next day or week or month, part and go separately into the world as if we are strangers, as if we have not left a burn on the other. _

I awoke at some point in the night, disturbed by something — an apprehension. My window was open a little and I heard a voice, low and tight and angry. Shut up. Shut up. | saw him, below, in the moonlight. He brought his cigarette to his mouth. The dog whined, her head held low, so timid. Stroke her, I whispered. The cigarette smoke curled from his mouth and the dog whined again. Shut up. Shut the fuck up, I said. He swung his open palm and struck the side of her head with great force. Before she knew what had happened, before her head had righted itself, he struck again and she yelped and slunk away into the shadows.

Long after he had gone inside, she emerged out into

the moonlight and stood very still, staring at the ground. I

pictured the tender insides of her head in slight disarray. Her

vision blurred, the world warped, ‘all sounds surreal. She might need to tilt her head to restore the balance of fluid in her inner ear or resettle tiny cerebral folds into skull cavities, eyes into sockets. There might be a little bleed, a swelling, a cerebral oedema. The brain might soften, and, if it does, I thought, then surely that will be a blessing, bringing, as it will, forgetfulness. She began to pace the worn grass. I watched her for a long time. I am aware of her always, there, at the edge of my being. Suppose there had been no petrol in

his shed that day. Suppose I had not set fire to his house, or run away in shame. That might have been my house. Those might have been my children. This might have been my dog.

There were no sudden showers or elemental lightning today. Not a leaf stirred and only the postman and a cat prowling on the footpath disturbed the stillness of the street. I took the stool into the garden and hoicked myself up on the wall and jumped down into S’s garden. The dog came, and I fell to my knees and threw my arms around her neck. Little by

little she let her body recline against mine, and sighed deeply. A few minutes passed. I know now that in our hour of need, set with a seemingly impossible task, we are, like the Greek heroes, suddenly imbued with extraordinary strength. I stood and scooped her up in my arms, lifted her high. I bore her weight with ease and grace, as in a dream, and as I raised her up I felt myself raised too, she and I airborne as one, until her paws grasped the top of the wall and her weight left me and she was gone, over the top, down into my garden.

I moved with serene calm and certainty, as if it were all preordained. I crossed S’s patio to the side entrance, slid back the bolt, let the door swing open. I crossed again and climbed — one, two, three — up onto the oil tank set against the wall, and jumped down into my own garden. The dog followed me inside and sat at my feet, and I laid a bowl of cereal and milk on the floor for her. I picked up my keys and went out and reversed my car up close to the front door, and opened the boot. I took the belt from my jeans and slid it under the dog’s collar and led her through the hall, and willingly she came.

Shh, it’s okay, I said as | drove. She was silent, closed up in the dark behind me, but I talked anyway. All the way to Sandymount, I talked. Nearly there, now, | said, as we approached the street and the wooden door set into the wall that I had seen the old man enter. And still I talked. Good

girl. I rang the bell and there came, instantly, the sound of dogs barking. When he opened the door he frowned and looked at her, then at me. Behind him, a gravel courtyard, an ivy-covered house.

‘You might not remember me,’ I said. “We met on the strand a few times.’

He nodded slowly, said nothing.

‘This one needs a home,’ I said. I told him, briefly, of her life. Still he said nothing, just stepped back, let the door fall open, let me relinquish her into his yard.

It was Laika, the Moscow stray, I conjured on the way home. Alone in the cabin, moving through the cold and the dark, amid shoals of cosmic dust, clusters of beryllium suns. The night before the launch, one of the scientists took her home to play with his children. He wanted to do something nice for her. I did this for S, I tell myself, as I turn onto the canal. I did it to save his children from the moment when she would turn on them. But I didn’t. I did it for her. I did it for me.

Now his car is pulling into the shied I wait. Five, six, seven... ten minutes pass on the display of my DVD player. The children are first onto the street. Then S and the woman emerge. He says something to her and signals to the houses opposite and then crosses, diagonally, to the other side. The girl runs after him and he takes her hand and I see, instantly, the resemblance, the synchronicity, ‘the limbic resonance. They begin at the house in the corner. He raises a hand to the doorbell.

My doorbell rings. It is the woman, with the boy beside her. .

‘Have you seen our dog?’ she asks. Her voice is stern, urgent.

I shake my head, frown, wait for her to elaborate. ‘No,’ I say then.

‘She's gone. The side door was open when we got home and she was gone.’ Her eyes are drilling mine.

‘She’s probably not far away,’ I say. ‘She probably just wandered off.’

The woman shakes her head. “The door was bolted — someone must have opened it ... She wouldn’t know her way home.’

I keep my eyes on her. My heart is pounding. You are not worthy of a dog, I think. You people.

The boy is staring at me. He gives me a chill and I turn back to his mother.

‘Did you see anything unusual today?’ she asks. ‘Anyone calling to our house, or anything?’

I can see S at the house opposite. Again I shake my head.

‘No,’ I say. ‘I was out for a few hours in the morning. But I was in all afternoon. I didn’t see anything.’ Across the street nobody answers and S turns and begins to walk out the driveway. She starts to move away. ‘If you remember anything, will you let us know, please? The children are very upset … Someone must have seen something — someone must have let her out, or taken her.’

The boy does not immediately turn. His lingering disconcerts me and I look away, and then back again at his pale anxious face. We regard each other for a moment and

I think he is going to speak. There is something he wants to say, something he wants me to decipher — it is there, a straining in his eyes — distress or sorrow or ... pleading. He lets out a sigh and then turns and follows his mother and before I have my door fully closed he is calling across the

street. Seán. I step into my living room and watch them stand and confer in the middle of the street. S raises his hand and rubs his forehead. He is looking in this direction, straight in the window at me, and our eyes meet. All that is within him, all he has ever seen and felt and known, all of time past, time fallen, is funnelled into this moment. Nothing is erased. The eye remembers everything. I sit in the twilight with the TV on mute. Bombs are raining down on Gaza again. She will return tomorrow, that woman. And the boy. What was it he wanted of me? To give him back the dog? To relieve him of his sorrow? To be rescued?

I switch off the TV and sit in the dark. I think of the dog in Sandymount, pacing the yard, then standing and staring at the ground. Outside, the big moon is rising. I can feel its pull. Enormous it is, tonight.

0 notes

fromprison2002 · 6 months

Text

Short Story

THE ICE BEAR

HELEN DUNMORE

The spicy heat of Stockholm station café knocked her out. She went limp and drunk. She’d been travelling a long time, coming home the awkward way through north Germany. Ferry across the Storebaelt, train, another ferry across from Helsingør, train across Sweden. Now she was here, still feeling the bump and rise of travel in the soles of her feet. She’d worn the same light cotton drawstring trousers all the way from Yugoslavia, and now she was itchily cold and her tanned feet looked yellow, not golden any more. There were three hours to go before the last ferry, the ferry home, sailed from Stockholm harbour across the Baltic. She could get a hot bath here, she knew, and wash her hair and strip off her dirty underwear and change the flimsy trousers for a pair of jeans.

But she’d been wrong. Things had changed over the summer she’d been away. They’d closed the bathrooms for renovations. Only a few showers were working, and as soon as she’d paid her money and was naked and streaming with water and shampoo, she’d seen that the floor drain was blocked in some careful fashion which meant that water had seeped out into the fresh clothes she’d laid on the tiles outside the shower cubicle, into her towel and her dirty underwear and even into the lining of her canvas boots. Everything was sodden. She wrung out the towel and wiped the water slowly and carefully off her shivering body, and then wound the towel around her head. She had no more clean pants. The dirty ones felt unpleasantly smooth and loose against her skin. She eased herself into her jeans and they gripped her damply at waist and crotch. She’d worn nothing heavier than Indian cotton for weeks, shirts and trousers and wrapover skirts which now lay rolled into faded dirty balls at the bottom of her rucksack.

But at least her leather jacket had stayed dry, hung on the back of the shower-room door. She put it on over her bare breasts and zipped it up to her neck. The springy curls of its sheepskin lining closed over her like home. She was safe again. She started to pick up her strewn dirty possessions. Well, naturally the bath-woman broke into a temper. She was trying to keep these shower-rooms nice for all the passengers, didn’t Miss understand. God help us all, she would have thought that anyone would have had the sense to see the drain was blocked and not to use this shower. There was a bell over there, look, with CALL FOR ATTENDANT printed underneath it. Amazing these students, with their university educations, not able to read a simple notice. And it was no good Miss bursting into tears. That didn’t help anyone.

The bath-woman bent down from her hips and swabbed the floor with a yellow cloth. She didn’t have to do that. She didn’t have to present her long-suffering backside to heaven as evidence. She had a perfectly good long-handled mop. But she just knew how bad it would make Miss feel to see the spread of the fat round her back as she bent, and to see the cloth stabbing into the corners of the bathroom, picking up soap scum and long dark hairs and globs of spilled shampoo. The bath-woman knew Ulli’s sort. You called them Miss to be civil. Jeans so tight she must’ve poured herself into them, or else a bit of skirt like a dishcloth showing everything she’s got. And then she wonders why she gets herself into trouble.

The café was filling up. Ulli twisted a corner of tissue into a wick to draw up the last of her tears. It was no problem really and anyway she was all the better for crying. She would hang up her wet towel and wash out her bra and pants in the Ladies once she was on the boat. Or why bother? She was nearly home. Three months ago the towel had been striped in dark pink and French navy, but the colours were faded now. She had dried the towel in the air of so many countries. She kept a length of string with her and she could quickly make a line under the luggage racks or across the window of a train compartment. She did not get in anyone’s way. She ate garlic sausage when it was offered to her, and she passed her bottles of mineral water and wine from mouth to mouth. She ate heavy yellow Spanish bread, puffs of brioche, black pumpernickel which reminded her of home, and drank milk cow-warm from a high, green, wet Bavarian pasture where a woman milked her two cows in a shed. Ice-cold or cow-warm? the woman asked her. There was a bucket of the morning’s milk chilling by the stream.

There were Bodensee apples and split figs from Dubrovnik market. On the Austro-Hungarian border there were baked ears of sweetcorn and tomatoes hanging on shrivelled vines, but no one to sell them. A white dog lolloped through the fields and licked Ulli’s feet. A poor skinny creature with yellow teeth spotted brown at the roots, and a healed gash on its right flank. A poor creature but scrabbling and close and companionable. It grinned as Ulli bit into the flesh of one of the tomatoes, as if it wished her well in drawing nourishment from something it could not eat.

At night Ulli rolled up her towel into a pillow and pressed it into the back of her neck as the Japanese do, so that she slept deeply. Very often she did not feel the formal pressure of the customs officer’s hand on her shoulder as the train went through some frontier in the middle of the night. She was too deeply asleep to hear voices calling up and down the train asking for papers, or to hear the compartment doors banging open as the frontier guards scanned faces shrunken with sleep. Tanned guards who wore their uniforms easily, boys with good homes near by perhaps, bored but attentive. Sometimes, by the time Ulli woke, not only the customs officials but several other righteous people in the compartment would be calling her through the noise of trains and dreams: MISS, MISS, MISS…

So now she had got rid of her tears. She sat in the upstairs café with enough Swedish money to buy herself two coiled buns scented with cardamom, and her own individual pot of coffee. Now a young man came to sit at her table. He glowed in his dark yellow waterproof jacket and over-trousers and his warm, silly cap which must have been knitted by someone who loved him. Or else why would there be so many changes of colour and so many different stitches in one cap? It would have been made by someone who loved him, making work for herself. He took out a book and glanced at her as if he wanted her to register the fact that this was a serious book and that he was reading it. Or perhaps there was more to it. Perhaps he had written it himself, she thought. It had a flat grey cover and thin papery leaves like slivered almonds. It looked as if it came off a small press powered by enthusiasts.

She sat eating her two split buns. She had spread butter on the one half and not on the other, to see which tasted better. Now her body was steamed and hot and fed. She pushed back her damp hair which she’d drawn forward to hide the snaily runnels of tears on her cheeks. Her hair was going into curls. She was just about to unzip her jacket when she remembered that she was wearing nothing underneath.

Before long the young man was talking to her. He too was taking the boat across to Finland. He adhered to a minor Lutheran sect, stricter and purer than the mainstream body of the church, which had gone astray, he told her. It was all very well to run social projects and be involved with down-and-outs and alcoholics, but you got nowhere by ignoring the question of personal salvation. It was Satan who had made us ashamed of the word sin. The young man was going to travel from town to town in northern Finland, on mission work. Every detail had been arranged. He showed her a map, with the towns where he would stay to give the mission marked by green circles. Beside the circles there were the names and addresses of the people who would look after him while he was there, members of the same sect who had been ploughing the ground ready for his seed. Even though he had never met them, they were all his brothers and sisters. This was the first time he had been thought ready to undertake such a mission on his own, without the support of senior and more experienced members. It was a challenge, and a great honour. He had lain awake for several nights thinking of the responsibility placed on his shoulders. Several. That sounded very suitable, Ulli thought. Just the right number of nights to lie awake. Nothing to excess.

But he had to tell Ulli, even though it made him ashamed of himself and he could only say this to her because she was a stranger, that he was torn between love of his wife and love of his mission work. He had just left his wife. He had had to part with her for six weeks. And they had only been married since April. He would show Ulli a photograph. No, it was no trouble, he had one always in his breast pocket.

Ulli did not want to see the photographs. She held her sticky bun out of the way and looked unwillingly at a stiff, bland, white-haired girl on her wedding day. Not much dressed up. It’s not the custom with us. In another photograph the same girl was crouching on her skis, with a tiny child wedged between her thighs. The child wore a knitted cap and a snowsuit and had its own small skis. His wife’s nephew. His wife loved children and they always liked to be with her. They would ring up and ask if they could come and spend Sunday afternoon with Auntie. She would make sweet cake and tie balloons to the apartment door. She would make little parcels of the cake, in blue and silver paper, and they would have treasure hunts round the apartment to find where she had hidden the parcels. And sometimes she would put in a little verse from the Scriptures with the cake and later on she would sit the children down with her and talk to them about it so that they would understand it.

He showed her another photograph of the nieces and nephews at their summer house up in the north, naked in the sunshine and dappled all over with the patterns of leaves. Their faces gleamed with health. They were blond and well-fed, with straight, even teeth. Animalish, Ulli thought.

‘My wife is with her sister now,’ the young man said.

But for the moment Ulli had had enough of these holy people with their sweet cake and their shiny metal pails for gathering berries in the forest in autumn and their straight-limbed children murmuring prayers at bedtime. She could see the sisters hunting for mushrooms:

‘Come, children, on such a beautiful day let us enjoy what God has given us!’

When they stumbled on a strange blub of fungus lunging out of a fallen branch they would not kick it away in disgust. There was bound to be a lesson in it. They’d take it to the apothecary’s to have it checked in the book to see if it was safe to eat.

The young man offered to carry her rucksack to the boat, but she said no. In spite of this he stayed beside her, continuing to talk about the summer house and the forest, and the summer just past, the first summer of his marriage. She would have thought he was drunk if she hadn’t known it to be impossible. No, it was just the exaltation of opening out his precious life to a stranger; a stranger who might perhaps profit from it. She was a dry run for his mission. So far he had asked her nothing about herself. Perhaps that came later, or perhaps it didn’t matter.

Two station officials strolled by and grinned at the young man. To her it seemed friendly, but the young man was embarrassed and annoyed. Then it gushed out that these same two officials had seen him saying goodbye to his wife not an hour before, which had naturally been a very serious moment for them both. Now they would think badly of him for walking along cheerfully with another girl at his side. They might think that he had arranged to meet the girl and that the kissing and clutching his wife to him had been insincere, one of these games that fool nobody and are not even meant to.

‘They were just looking at you. It didn’t mean anything,’ said Ulli.

Already a slow stain of ideas seemed to be spreading into the gap between the young man and herself. How could she tell him inoffensively that he was not the kind of young man whom girls would wish to meet for brief occasions of sin, after which he could repent luxuriously to his wife? So his wife had come to see him off. It was necessary to move her mentally out of the dark forest with leaves falling from the birch trees and her sister cooking coffee so that they could talk of mission and chickenpox at the white scrubbed table while the children played on the lake shore. No, his wife was on a train streaming its way north through the suburbs of Stockholm. Perhaps she had a headache. Perhaps she hadn’t managed to get a seat and her fresh bland body was pressed against that of an engineer who scarcely noticed her because he was dreaming of his Friday-night sauna and a tall, thick glass of chilled beer.

Ulli felt scorn for such wives rise in her. Wives who know somewhere, secretly, that for their warm children to bloom by the stove and for the coffee to taste as good as it does there has to be rain beating against the windows and a knife of wind trying to get in through the flouncy curtains. There has to be a risk of cuts in social security, and a campaign against vagrancy. There have to be kids without jobs in too-thin jeans racing from the launderette to their bedsitters which smell of damp, in cities where they know no one. There have to be divorces and children dying of leukaemia and ships going down and desperate struggles in the darkness.

The young man flipped out his tracts like playing-cards on the Formica table of the ship’s restaurant. In a moment he was going to look at the menu. There was good Swedish cooking on this boat, he could tell her that. He had taken off his waterproofs and bared his intricate jersey of Icelandic wool. Yes, his wife had knitted it for him. Also the cap.

‘I’m going out on deck,’ she said.

‘Well, that is good, while you are gone I will do my work,’ he replied springily. In just a moment, she thought, he will put that photograph of his wife down among the tracts. The ace in his pack. With her there, he will always make the highest score.

Outside the windows Ulli could see people walking around the decks, their clothes blowing lightly against their legs. They laughed as they came round the curve of the ship and the wind caught them. Ulli half-rose from the table, but the young man asked if she would look after his things until he came back from the self-service counter. She watched over his tracts and his good luggage and his waterproofs until he came back with the ship’s special, a large all-day breakfast. He put down the tray and spread out his plates, his cup and his cutlery, and then he wiped the tray with a paper napkin and took it back to the collection point. While he was gone, she looked at his food. There were oval slices of sticky black bread, twists of sweet white bread with poppy seeds, sweet-cream butter in a small plastic churn, a fan of sliced Emmentaler and Edam, another of dry pink ham. He had a frosted glass of apple juice, and a smoking pot of coffee.

The young man smiled at her as he sat down and spread another clean napkin in his lap.

He told her that girls like her were always thinking of slimming. It was foolish of them. And the very worst thing was to go without breakfast. Every morning he sat down with his wife to a breakfast like this. No matter how late they had gone to bed, no matter how busy the day ahead – and their days were very busy. Before they went their separate ways they would sit down together and relax over their food and their coffee. His wife always put napkins on the table, and flowers. It was a very special time of the day for them both. Sometimes they’d have important things to tell one another, sometimes they’d just chat.

‘It’s wonderful,’ he said, leaning towards her so she could see the sheen of butter on the inside of his lips. ‘There’s nothing I cannot tell to my wife.’

Ulli’s mouth was puckering at the sight of so much food. The white, solid, spicy cheese. The thin ham with orange crumbs at the rim.

‘I must go out on deck,’ she said.

‘Yes,’ he agreed, ‘you look pale.’

She jogged his arm as she squeezed past him into the aisle, but luckily he had not overfilled his coffee-cup. Nothing slopped, nothing was lost.

The ferry was well out of harbour. All around the flat grey Baltic stretched lankly to the horizon. She thought of her last crossing, going west at dawn on a June morning, with the sea alive and transparent all around, lapping the islands as the ship nosed its way between the poles marking the deepwater channel. She had leaned out over the rails to watch the depth change. You could see rocks and white sand with weed rippling across it. They went past island after island, uninhabited, rocky, solitary. Then there had been a bigger island with birch trees and smoke rising from a summer cottage, and a dark-blue rowing-boat tied up at the jetty. They’d passed so close she had heard the water suck at the underside of the jetty. Their wake spun out behind them and the little dark-blue boat went up and down like a rocking-horse.

But now the Baltic had the dark look of late autumn on it. Now the ship throbbed along purposefully, more alive than the empty sea around it. Ulli crisped her hands in her jacket pockets. The wind filtered between the waistband of the jacket and her bare skin. Little prickling slivers of cold. She ought to keep moving. Ahead of her a group of drunken Finns lurched around the deck, arm in arm, the end one of them catching hold of the rail to steady their line. They opened their mouths and bawled out a song which had been on the radio twenty times a day all summer, all over Europe. They were like angry babies with their square mouths and their rumpled cheeks, she thought. They made her tender to them in spite of herself. Small square solid self-respecting men in quilted jackets. Their flesh and hair blending to the same colour as the Baltic. But beneath that blend, a flash of wildness and melancholy, like a knife gliding through snow. She knew them all. They were the men who drank in the bar with her father, though he didn’t work with them any longer. Education had moved him on. They were the men who’d found her after-school jobs when she was fourteen. The ones who organized collections for women whose husbands had accidents at work; the ones who planned orgiastic, ritual surprise parties when someone was transferred or retired. She knew how quickly their fierce comradeship of songs and schnapps in the breast pocket could change to fighting drunkenness.

Last winter there’d been an exhibition of drawings from north Sweden in the Town Museum. She’d gone there one freezing afternoon. She’d had three red tulips in a cone of plastic to take on to the house where she was asked for supper, and she couldn’t find anywhere to put them down. The cloakroom attendant wouldn’t take them. Drawings from north Sweden. Squat dark scrawled people, shovelling earth. Women with muscles like ropes in their necks, wrestling with cattle. All of them lit from underneath with the same light of wild disturbance. A dark skimming line of forest off to the right. The people weren’t looking at the clods of earth they turned, or the pigs they tended. Their eyes were pinched and secretive. One man rested on a pitchfork and gazed out to where the dark scribble of trees was stirring in the first north winds of the winter. One woman picked potatoes for the clamp. She had her child pressed against her skirt as she went down the rows of churned earth. Her big hands were wrapped in sacking, but the finger-ends poked out of it, chapped. She had bound her child’s feet over and over with more strips of sacking. The child’s blunt pale face glimmered against her skirt.

Well then, why aren’t I a wife? Ulli asked herself. Why haven’t I made sure to have enough money to buy myself an all-day breakfast as of right, and stuff it down in the face of someone who’s craving for meat and cheese for once instead of cheap sweet buns? Why don’t I feel confident that the facilities of the ship have all been designed with me in mind? And why hasn’t anybody told me what they are, those important things I ought to be talking about over a breakfast table set with napkins and roses? How does a young man like that look at me and know without even thinking about it that I’m not wife material?

She turned back. She could still see the young man through the restaurant window. He must have felt her gaze, for without looking up he curled his arms protectively around his plate of ham and cheese. She waved and he looked up and saw her. He looked up and out at her with his pale Lutheran eyes. His big woolly jersey had fluffed up in the heat and steam of the restaurant, like the fur of an animal which scents danger. He had his shoulders hunched and his pale tight curls merged into the wool of the jersey.

Ulli recognized him. He was an ice bear, standing on his own perilous floe of ice. He had bumped and nudged into her and now they were just slipping apart again, so gently that you couldn’t tell where the crack had started, how it had parted. The gap wasn’t much. Half a metre, then a metre. She could still jump it. But she was better off without the ice bear, she thought. Bears look woolly and white but they’ll claw you up for the use of their mate and their young. She’d seen little ice bears gambolling in the wreckage before now, feasting on the bones. The water was sharp and dark with ice. The bear’s breath would be meaty and hot, and there would be words like adultery stuck between his teeth.

She’d walk right round the ship. She scooped back her hair and tucked the flap of it into her jacket collar. Now her jeans were dry and warm again, and her blood was beginning to course. The wind from across the sea beat colour into her cheeks as the ferry drummed on across the Baltic. It felt so good to have the weight of her rucksack off her back for once. She knew she could trust the young man to guard it for her as conscientiously as he would guard his own breakfast. Ahead of her, the drunken Finns were blocking the way to the foredeck. They saw her coming and one of them unhooked his arm from his neighbour’s to let her pass. She smiled thanks and he called after her as she went by:

‘Miss! Miss!’

She turned and saw he was holding out his bottle of schnapps to her. His friends were smiling him on, smiling their flat curled smiles. A trip for the boys, a day trip or a whole weekend of steady drinking and going wild, away from children and wives. Two swayed together, propping each other. But none of them was out of his head. None of them was fighting drunk yet. They wanted it all to be OK. They wanted her to like their friend, to drink their schnapps. She looked at the man holding out the bottle and saw that to him she was really Miss, in her jacket and jeans just like any of their daughters. Maybe they couldn’t understand their daughters either. Maybe their daughters were at university, ill-dressed, no credit to their fathers who had saved up to take them for a meal out at the best restaurant in town. Daughters who spoke scornfully of good jobs, and refused to understand that education was something to make use of.

She could bet the bottle of schnapps that not one of these men had a text of scripture anywhere about him. She took the offered bottle of schnapps, which was wet around the rim with the saliva of the men who had been drinking from it.

‘Good health!’ she said, and lifted the bottle to her mouth and took one swallow of the dry burning liquid. It went down and lit up the spread of her veins right to her finger-ends. A wave of her newly washed hair curled around the bottle and then the wind flapped it free. She handed back the schnapps to the man who had given it. He ducked his head formally, half in a nod, half in a bow.

‘She’s not one of those Swedish girls, is she?’ grumbled one man on the edge of the group, who was shifting about, restless with all this. But the one who’d offered the drink turned round on him.

‘No, the Devil take you, she’s not,’ he said, in drunken, dignified reproof. ‘Are you, Miss? She’s one of us. She’s on her way home, and glad of it, I bet. She’s had enough of those snobs over there with their mouths screwed up like arse-holes, haven’t we all?’

No, not a drunken overnighter with the boys. She’d got it all wrong. They were working over in east Sweden, guest-workers of the north, putting in their overtime and keeping their noses clean. And home by ferry two weekends a month. She hoped the ice bear would not ask them to love him for parting from his flowery breakfast table for six weeks.

She thanked the man for the drink. He held out his hand and she took it, and then she stepped away and walked on to the foredeck where a bit of pale autumn sun put a grey shine on the planking. The ferry was going faster now. It creamed away the sea from its sides, and when she put her hand on the side of the funnel it was trembling. She walked on and a hot wall of noise from the engine-room drowned out the men’s singing.

0 notes