by Marge Piercy
“We’re the Pied Piper.” Shawn squatted on the other side of the breakfast fire, stirring coffee boiled in a can. His hair had grown out a mixture of dyed brown and yellow like leaves turning in the fall, and he was tanned the color of cowhide. “They swarm out like lemmings. It’s driving me crazy. What are they looking for?”
“There’s nothing to hold them where they are. They aren’t attached” The kids in the towns that had been emptied of their content and left to decay only needed a body in movement to draw them out of those houses where they were precariously lodged, loosely attached, ill at ease. A faith flared up in the columns that if there were enough of them they would survive. Even Corey felt that way sometimes. “They won’t kill all the kids. They can’t. What animal kills off its own young?”
Ginny was sitting cross-legged with her hands resting lightly on her belly. Her skin was dappled with freckles, so that her eyes stood out of her face a clear honey brown. “The corporate animal. People are functions. Institutions spin off corporations. You can always replace a body or a brain that stops functioning efficiently with another just like it. Can’t you? That’s what they think the world is.”
Then they came to a valley near Salt Lake City and found an Army encamped blocking their way.
Corey was made of wire. His skin was paper. Always he was weary. He walked four times as far as the column, because he went back and forth, back and forth, shepherding. He had been superficially grazed and wounded a dozen times but never hurt badly enough to keep him down the next day. He ignored that kind of danger. He did not believe they could kill him that way. But constantly he nagged at Shawn and at Ginny to stay out of danger as well as they could, especially Ginny.
At night as he lay in her arms, her body felt soft and vulnerable to him, a thing metal would want to tear. They were short on food, they were hungry all of the time, and now he could feel her bones against him, till she almost felt like someone else. He tried to restrain his anxiety, to keep himself from calling her name again and again in rising hysteria when she passed out of his sight. That reminded him too much of Joanna. All things reminded him of Joanna. So he stifled his voice and instead his eyes swung in his head, while he looked and looked for her in silent panic. Watching him always, Shawn would understand. Shawn would come to his elbow and say quietly, she’s over by the stream, she’s resting in the bushes.
For a long time he had not wanted to give her his child. Though they made love, he did not want to make a baby with Ginny. But as they slept together night after night on the ground in the old blanket, he began to tell her secret things, sacred things, things of his childhood, things his mother had told him about the stars and the earth and the moon and Coyote—old silly dark things that ran in his head. He told her his first vision, and the coming of the buffalo. Then he gave her the child that was the small swelling in her belly, between the hipbones that should not be visible, that he should not be able to feel. The things he was telling her were for the child. He was telling stories to the minnow child hidden in her flesh and the woman who held it and held him.
They camped waiting for the scouts to come back. Marcus led the scouts. Marcus and Tiger were their eyes and ears and long tentative fingers. They could slip through an encirclement and back without raising a random shot. Time after time Marcus had brought them through. Now again he came back with a report. He had found a way up and out of the valley on a narrow exposed trail. They would have to wait until dark. They would have to fool the soldiers into thinking they were still camped in the valley, blocked there. They held council and debated. A group of seventy women chose to stay. They would dance and keep the fires burning. They would try to fraternize with the soldiers and persuade them not to attack.
One of the couple of survivors told Corey about it two days later in the mountains. After all, the soldiers were young like them, just like them. It was easy to talk in the dark across no man’s land. They had long conversations. Some of the soldiers came over. The girls taught them to dance as the Indians did, and the soldiers took off their uniforms and danced naked in the firelight. They turned on with bread and with the grass the soldiers had. Some couples went beyond the light of the fires and lay together. Before dawn the soldiers went back, in time for the attack. As soon as it was light, the planes came over.
When helicopters found the main column again, they dropped leaflets urging the Indians to surrender. They would be allowed for a brief period to turn themselves in safely, the leaflets promised. They offered a parley. Some of the leaflets mentioned Corey by name and said he must come to parley for the surrender, that the terms would be explained by a former Indian who had been captured at the raid on the New Jersey farm.
If the leaflets had said Joanna, he would not have believed them. He would have seen a trap. But because the leaflets did not mention her by name, he knew it was really Joanna. She had managed it somehow. Yes, they had put his name in because she had said he was a leader, in order to find him. Probably she had pretended to know him casually. He said nothing, nothing, except that he would go to the place specified in the leaflets and hear the terms the government was offering.
Ginny knew at once. “How can you be so sure it’s her?”
“Who?”
She laughed at him harshly. “You pretend so badly. But be careful. Be careful! I think it’s her too. But we think so with different parts of our-selves—you with the strength of your hoping and me with the strength of my fearing. Reality is someplace else. If you are disappointed, what will you do? Don’t throw us away.”
In an abstract way he wanted to comfort her. After all, he was still with her lying in the blanket. He reached out his hand and touched her cheek, and a slow tear came out of her eye and ran over his finger tips. He stared into her face, her clear honey-colored eyes melting into his gaze. She wanted to believe, he could feel her wanting to hope and believe. Odd how she had changed and not changed. The same round face with the pointy chin, same clear eyes and little nose, same freckles and smooth hair a shade or two darker than her eyes and soft as down. Her expression was changed. But her desire to feel him loving her was just the same. She had been good to him. She was strong now. He even believed that she loved him and that her love meant him well. She was like a round hut in which he was safe, in which there was little that could hurt him, less that wanted to. She had come to him when the world had broken on his head. It had been her decision to be there. After all, she had chosen him in his weakness and despair and defeat. She must have known Joanna would come back.
Now Joanna came like the sun and stood between them. Wanting awakened in him again. He became a man instead of the ghost of a shaman, and he kept his secrets in himself.
There was still that swelling—the baby. Now he did not want to think about it. Time enough when it appeared yelling. Sometimes he thought of it strongly as his. Imagined she would give it to him. Sometimes he thought of it as hers: she had wanted it, and now she had it. He let himself remember at times that Shawn wanted her, that Shawn had let him take her because Shawn felt guilty and could not assert his desire. It would be all right. He would arrange it all. Perhaps there would be Ginny and Shawn. Perhaps he would get around all of them, fix things with Joanna so he could keep them both. Maybe Joanna would still feel guilty about Shawn, so she would have to accept Ginny. But at any cost, he would have Joanna back. So he withdrew into himself and waited, while on the last night Ginny lay beside him sobbing in the dark and he pretended sleep, made himself into rock to wait.
He could see Joanna’s red hair in the pass before he could see her clearly. He could see her red hair as he came down the pass toward the rendezvous. She sat on a rock in the morning sun. They were between the two armies, the army of metal and the army of flesh. As he came close and she was still there, he wondered how he had seen her hair, because she wore a straw hat that covered it and threw patchy shadow on her face. She looked different. She slumped there waiting. She glanced occasionally at the pass, oftener at a
book she was reading. He tried to make himself strong to endure what she had gone through in prison and among the enemies. Maybe his had been the easier road in spite of all, and he had to think of that now in order to reach her.
She was wearing bright cotton pants and a striped shirt that looked clean and new. They must have issued her clothes for the meeting. She looked bigger and older. She had put on weight. Prison and lack of exercise.
“Hello, Corey” She nodded, squinting against the sun, and gave him her hand to shake formally. It was hot and dry.
He could not touch her yet. He could not put his hands on her, although they itched and the fingers curled on nothing. Were they watching from nearby? “Is this an ambush? Do you know?”
“Don’t be silly. They could have shot you any time coming down. They want to give you a chance.” She sounded impatient and a little bored.
As soft as he could, he asked, “Are they listening?”
“You’ve become very paranoid.”
“A lot of killing does that” He was angry for a moment. He saw the thing he hated most to see: the body of the last of their babies, Sarah Jean, with the blood pouring out from her torn chest, and the heart exposed and still spurting blood, throbbing like a small animal, like a red frog. Her mouth open. Her eyes open. He sat down beside Joanna.
She moved away a little. He was almost too shy to look at her. Then he made himself. Joanna, Joanna, Joanna. Her hair was cut shorter and processed in some way that took the kinks out. It was neatly and fussily curled around the bottom of the hat. It did not look quite real. It needed to be loose in the wind.
“Take off your hat.”
“The sun bothers me” She stirred under his eyes. “I’ve gotten fat, haven’t I?”
“The more, the better. You look good to me.”
“I put on a lot of weight in the hospital. Insulin therapy does that”
“The hospital? Were you sick?”
“I was in bad shape when they took me in. I started a fire, you know. So I had to go into the hospital for treatment. First they tried electroshock and then insulin.” She grimaced. “I really hated electroshock. It was all pretty grisly the first couple of months”
He could not speak. His throat turned into a bone. He took her hand and held it against his mouth.
She detached it. “I was in very bad shape. Doctor Hayes, the psychiatrist I had after the first month or so, was very good. He brought me through the tunnel. It’s like being born all over again, it really is. I suppose that sounds like nonsense to you, until you go through it yourself. I feel as if he’s my real father. I put up such a fight at first, not to let him get through to me, not to let him reach me. But he’s such a wonderful, devoted doctor, he wouldn’t let me discourage him. It was like learning to read, except this time I was learning to read myself.”
Her voice went on. He could not speak. He sat in a stiff huddle beside her. She was somehow bigger than him and puffy. Maybe she was puffy with the words they had injected into her. He had to listen and wait—wait for Joanna to come out.
She giggled suddenly. “I’m supposed to be talking to you about terms and all that. You have to come in, to bring in whoever is still running around up there with you, before it’s too late. But I really wanted to tell you about all I learned about myself. I think you could be helped, Corey, I really do.” Voluntarily she reached out this time and patted his arm.
He seized her hand inside his. It sat there, hot and dry and impassive, in his grip.
“I want to try to help you, Corey, honestly. Because I came to understand why I did what I did with Shawn. Well, I was trying to castrate you.”
“Never mind about that shit. I understand it my own way now. I haven’t been faithful either. I don’t want us to get stuck talking about that stuff now. What matters is getting you back.”
“But I did castrate you. I mean, you were impotent then.”
“Only that time, Joanna. It wouldn’t have lasted.”
“But you were. All week. You don’t have to deny it.”
“Oh, Jesus, don’t think that. Come here” He tried to draw her closer.
“It was the whole matter of my penis envy. I had no good female models. I wanted to be a boy and I tried to turn myself into one. For instance, sleeping around and running away from home and trying to reject myself—pre-tending my name was Joanna, pretending I could become someone else. My name is Jill, and I wish you’d use it. Wanting to be a warrior—what was that but wanting to be what my father was? It was that whole fixation on the Army. But there was a positive side in me, even then. For instance, Dr. Hayes pointed out that I was captured because I was in Tunnel D with the babies. That was my effort in a crisis situation to act out my femininity”‘
“That’s bullshit. Sylvie deserted her post. You got stuck. It was an accident”
“You speak of accidents because you repress these things. I don’t need to, any longer. I’m ready to face myself and accept who I am and live in the world.”
“Joanna, Joanna, what do they have to give you that you want? A pair of new pants and a clean shirt? Words that make your tongue go flap, flap? That awful stuff they put on your hair to make it lie flat? Your hair is naturally wild and beautiful.”
“I have problem hair, but I accept that now. I don’t exaggerate it. I was like a child who’s naughty to attract attention. I wanted to be loved because I was bad, instead of acting in such a way that I would attain real relationships with people”
“Shut up!” He made his voice softer. “Don’t parrot their garbage. You’ve been processed, and you’ve taken it in, so that you could survive. But listen, Joanna, you’re a few feet away from freedom.”
“You listen to me, Corey. I’m where I want to be now, and I don’t mean sitting on this crappy rock. I’ve got a scholarship to a decent school. I’m going to be a teacher. I’m going to be something on my own.”
“Joanna, your people are up there in the mountains waiting, Shawn and Ginny and Marcus—remember Marcus and Tiger from the Catskills? Your people are waiting to take you back. The enemy has hurt you, but the pain will go away and leave you tougher and stronger. Freedom and your own people.”
“How can you talk about freedom, when you’ve come to negotiate surrender? Now look at this damn paper. You have to sign it. Or take it back and have a council and bring it down tomorrow.” She thrust something at him, fine print, lists of conditions.
“Don’t think that. I came down to get you! Joanna, look at me! Look at me!”
She turned her head, and her brown eyes met his, squinted against the sun’s glare. Eyes like hubcaps. They gave him nothing human. Only himself reflected twice looking back. A robot that looked a little like Joanna. A plastic doll with rubbery skin and a smell of plastics about it. He was suddenly running before he knew he had stood up. He turned, tearing up the stiff pages of the treaty. She frowned after him.
“Corey, come back here. Sit down. We have to settle things. Corey!”
He hurled the fragments of paper at her. He wanted to throw them in her face, but they drifted lazily in the sunny air and idled away. A funnel was closing on his head. Claws in his chest. The air was glass. It was crushing him as he ran blindly, and a choked scream escaped him like an injured bird drag-flapping off, like a wounded crow. He screamed again, again muffled, and fell to his knees. The rocks were spines under him. His hands scraped at his pounding chest. The pressure had warped his head.
Then he was lifted up. Shawn pulled him to his feet and hoisted him and carried him over his shoulder. His head hung down and he could hear Shawn panting as he trotted. Corey’s head banged against Shawn’s back. Then his sight riddled with red and black holes and receded, as he willingly let go of consciousness and slipped down into the swift dark river and was carried away.
“It’s better to die than to become plastic. It’s better to be shot than to be reconditioned. It’s better to live your own death than somebody else’s life.” That was Corey’s message
to the people. He could not tell them the terms because he had not received them. He said unconditional surrender. Some went down. Most stayed.
Ginny had taken her knapsack and cooking pot and gone to Marcus. She was mad at Shawn too. She stood up and said that she was leaving, and she wasn’t going to surrender either. She was going to try to get through the encirclement. Why wait for death? As long as there was a chance, take it. But she did not go. She spent her time persuading other people to leave, and some of them did slip out by ones and twos to try to escape. She wanted Marcus to leave with her, but he wasn’t ready yet.
Corey paid no attention. He had only to look at her belly, and he did not believe she was about to go off from him. He found himself blocked. He could not make himself move. He was frozen with despair and the lush desire to die. He knew he must steal time, the terrible luxury of time, to fast and wait. He must cleanse himself of his despair and wait for the knowledge of what must be done. His desire to be alone was like an intense thirst. He did not care for anyone. He did not care for himself. Abstractly he worried for his people, but he could not connect enough to bring that to action.
Early in the morning, he climbed to what felt like the peak of a nearby mountain. Clouds filled in the valley and the ravines as he climbed, and though he scrambled above them into the sun, he could see nothing but the immediate brownish rocks and the shaggy white ceiling of cloud below. He fasted and sang chants and waited. He slept and was wakeful. But he did not even dream. He passed through hunger into weakness and then into a dry lightness, like a desiccated leaf. He rose into the clear purified state in which vision came. Yet nothing happened. He remained still and empty and waiting.
