Fictions

by Nancy Kress

  I stared at the monitor screen in disbelief. Alpha waves—four of the individual curves showed alpha waves! Leaning around the edge of the computer, I searched for the four kids. All of them had their eyes closed. Kids still staring at their screens were slumped in their seats, and a slump is hard to do when your head is held immobile. The evoked potentials were low and monotonous, the acid curves flat, the subliminal stimuli not even registering. Only the evals showed activity, a high curve that didn’t need my training to be interpreted: they hated it.

  At the master console the proud author typed the last period and beamed through her bifocals.

  Garber, I thought. Let Garber handle it. Garber would tell her better than I.

  I released the helmets and the kids scrambled out gratefully.

  The author bustled up, patting lavender curls squashed by a net so carefully arranged that I fought a sudden urge to play tic-tac-toe in its symmetrical squares.

  “Well, it went splendidly, didn’t it, my dear? Just splendidly. My, I find a c-aud studio so interesting!”

  I stared at the printout as if it were the Rosetta stone, and hoped she couldn’t read graphs.

  “Why don’t you just go ahead to Mr. Garber’s office, Ms. Tidwell, and I’ll be along as soon as I sort these out.”

  “Oh, I don’t mind waiting for you, dear. Not at all.”

  “Well, it’s just that it might take a while.”

  She laughed brightly, a kind of chuckle around big horse teeth. “Oh, I guess I can wait, all right. I’ve waited twenty-two years, you know. That’s how long I’ve been working on Little Agnes’ Adventure. On and off, of course. You can’t rush inspiration, you know—what’s that, dear?”

  “Nothing. Nothing. I just . . . cleared my throat.”

  “Would you like a cough drop? No? You have to take care of yourself, dear, a young woman like you. I learned that, I should hope, in all my years of teaching—did I tell you I was a schoolteacher, dear? Retired, now, as of last year. Taught forty-four years. And then I said to myself, I said, Ida Tidwell, if you’re ever going to take that book and publish it, now’s the time. So I just pulled my savings out of the bank—you sure you don’t want a cough drop? That does sound bad!”

  “No . . . no.”

  “Well, you know best, of course. So I just pulled my savings out and came to Mr. Garber with my manuscript, and here I am, a real live author! My, I can’t wait to see Little Agnes in print.”

  Garber. Yes. Let Garber do it.

  “Can I help you roll those up, dear?”

  “No. No, thank you. Ms. Tidwell, may I ask you something?”

  “Certainly, dear. About Agnes? Was some part not clear?”

  “Not about Agnes. Ms. Tidwell, what was it all those years?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “What did you teach? Was it English?”

  “Oh, my, no, dear!”

  “Not literature?”

  “I taught algebra.”

  I smiled gratitude on behalf of forty-four years of literature classes. “Tell you what, Ms. Tidwell, I know you must be tired from this long session. If you’ll just run along”—oh hell, I never say things like “just run along”—“to Mr. Garber’s office . . .”

  “Oh, I don’t mind waiting, dear.” She smiled at me with baby-blue eyes, serene and flat as an empty sky. “This is all so very exciting for me. It’s always been my dream, you know, to write a book. And I knew I could do it. I knew it would make everything all worthwhile.”

  “What?”

  “What . . . why, dear, what’s the matter?”

  “What did you just say?”

  “I said I knew the book would make it all worthwhile. All those years of teaching algebra. Why, dear, you look so—”

  “I’ve finished here. Let’s see Mr. Garber now, shall we?” I ushered her into Garber’s office, put the printouts on his desk, and pleaded my bladder. When I returned from the toilet, twenty-five minutes later, she was gone, but the office still held the unmistakable feel of disaster. There’s a theory that any monitor’s repeated experiences of seeing brain waves related to graphic interpretation leads to a slight rise in natural sensing of electromagnetic auras. Nobody’s ever proved it. But Garber’s office was soggy with ineffectual disillusionment, wadding up the air like damp tissues.

  “Was it very bad?”

  “If you’d stayed, you’d know.”

  “I’m sorry, Garber, really I am. But I couldn’t. I just couldn’t.”

  He swept the rolls of printout off the side of his desk and toward the wastebasket. They missed.

  “Garber, I don’t know exactly how to say this, but about her contract . . . her life savings—”

  “I already refunded it.”

  I walked over and kissed him. “I should have known you would. Then there’s no real harm done, is there? She’ll get over it. Don’t look like that—people have to learn every day that they don’t have talents they’d hoped for.”

  He looked at me with a sudden intensity.

  “After all,” I said, too loudly, “the city is swarming with would-be writers, everyone knows that. Scratch a schoolteacher and you find a c-aud applicant, right?”

  “Right,” Garber said. “Yes. Well.” He reached for my hand and began playing with the fingers, crossing and uncrossing them. A silence stretched itself too long, then went on even longer.

  “Mary . . .”

  “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  “No, what were you going to say?”

  “Nothing.” With the hearty air of a man skillfully changing the subject, he added, “Hey—did you look out the window yet? Look down there. They’ve been at it all morning.” Ten stories below, pickets marched. I could just make out the block lettering on the poison-green signs.

  C-AUD ARTIST FRAUD

  GIVE BOOKS BACK TO HUMANS!

  CHILDREN DESERVE MORE THAN MECHANICAL MINDS

  “They had a bunch of children marching with them earlier,” Garber said. “Tots of about six or seven.”

  “Are they all nonviolent?”

  “So far.”

  I shrugged. “Then let them march. What does it matter?” Garber swiveled his chair back toward his desk and said, as though it were an answer, “Jameson videoed me this morning.”

  “He called you?” G-M Press is definitely not accustomed to getting videos from famous critics.

  “He’s sending me a manuscript to read.”

  I sat on Garber’s desk. “What kind of manuscript?”

  “I don’t know. He wouldn’t say. But he made me promise to drop everything else and read it instantly. He looked disturbed, rumpled, and upset, but in an odd sort of way.”

  “What sort of odd sort of way?”

  “Like a journalist with an exclusive on the Titanic. Mary, what do you think art is for?”

  I blinked. Abstractions are not Garber’s style. No one at G-M Press asks what art is for, unless he’s being high-camp humorous; Garber was not. It was a question I hadn’t even heard spoken aloud since lecture classes at college. Garber was looking at me with the rumpled half embarrassment of a man who knows he’s just said something faintly impractical and ridiculous, and I looked away and fumbled.

  “Garber, I couldn’t—”

  “No, forget it. Stupid question.” He shook his head from side to side, the old mind-cleaning bounce, and came up smiling.

  “Dinner at Cellini’s?”

  Susan’s oral-history project hung in the air, joining Ida Tidwell’s tears and Garber’s abashed rhetoric.

  “No, you can’t, I know,” Garber said. “But next week? For sure?”

  “For sure.”

  As I left, he went back to the window, watching the picketers with mild geniality. Ms. Tidwell’s printouts unrolled a little more on the carpeted floor.

  It had started to rain. I put down the last page of Greta, leaned over the desk, and opened my tiny bedroom’s one window. Outside it was dark, with smeared
blurs of light shining through the rain, and soft splats as the drops hit the screen. Drifting in were those summer-night smells that even New York can’t totally obliterate: damp earth, wet dust from the screen, and, improbably, roses.

  Were there roses in the minipark across the street? Suddenly it seemed very important to remember. I leaned my forehead against the dark wet screen, its slippery wire squares reminding me of Ms. Tidwell’s hairnet, and tried to picture the park. One chipped bench, one maple tree protected by a ten-foot whitewashed cage, one litter basket overflowing with objects not bearing close examination, and one flower bed. Were there roses in the flower bed? And if so, were they red or pink or white or yellow? Long-stemmed or clustered on low bushes? Straggly or well pruned? Buds or already blowsy, their ripeness turning messy, dropping silky petals like specks of blood?

  I couldn’t see the roses. All I could see was the child protagonist of Greta.

  It was a fabulous book. Literally: a book fabled, beyond human expectations, removed from the mundane not because of what happened in it, but because of what it made of what happened. Huckleberry Finn without the leaky ending. A female Holden Caulfield brought with power and poignancy into the 1990’s. Oliver Twist without bathos. Johannsen had painted Greta’s rite of passage with the uncompromising harshness of a Faulkner, the detail of a Colette, the controlled compassion of a Steinbeck.

  So many literary allusions. But they weren’t quite right, after all. It wasn’t those other masters Johannsen had echoed, it was me, my own deepest resonances in the subconscious, or wherever the hell they’re supposed to be kept now, so that as I read, little shocks of recognition and discovery flashed between me and the badly typed pages. More: Greta was the universal childhood experience, being a stranger in a harsh and unfamiliar adult land, lifted to a peak so lucid and sharp that it might have been the prototype for Twain, Dickens, et al, instead of their culmination.

  I saw that I had set the last page crookedly on top of the rest. I straightened it carefully, taking a long time to get it exactly right, all four corners perfectly aligned to slide the manuscript into its cardboard box. There was a stain on one corner of the box; it looked like jelly. Meticulously I rubbed it with a tissue, then an eraser, until the smear was gone and the rubbed nap all lay in the same direction.

  Then there was nothing else to do.

  Greta had done it all.

  I undressed, hanging my jumpsuit with mathematical care. Shoulders equidistant on the hanger, boots lined up at right angles, toothbrush plumb-line vertical in its holder. The hairbrush free of all pulled strands. Everything necessary attended to. The key to the locked drawer holding my manuscript made a tinny, gurgling sound as I flushed it down the toilet, but it didn’t clog the pipe.

  I went to bed.

  At a third-rate c-aud publisher, art is for making money. But now I thought about McGratty and the little girls he had entertained so well. I thought about Garber dying, and Ida Tidwell smiling so much over so little. I thought about Susan and about Nellie Kay Armbruster, both glaring at me as if we belonged to different species, with no possible hope of first contact. I thought about Johannsen, composing Greta out of whatever universal vision blazed from him through G-M’s aging equipment to his c-aud, and back again. And again. And I thought about Mummy-sweet. All that pain, then: wasted. Never used; never transformed; never, dammit, justified. Not by me.

  The rain stopped. The sliding sounds of traffic on wet pavement drifted in the dark window. A dog barked.

  So what do you do, when somebody else builds the pyramids where you needed to put up your bark hut? First you think, a dead dream, and then you tell yourself that the least you can do is avoid thinking in those damn tired clichés. Then you realize that even telling yourself that is a cliché, and so is the realization that it is. Then you plod round and round the same tired track, trying not to see what’s there—or, rather, trying to see what’s not there, the unique deep contribution that all of a sudden is now neither unique nor necessary, nor even, by comparison, very deep. You listen to traffic. You listen to your own heartbeat, and to those weird New York night sounds that are never identifiable but always familiar: thumps and hoots and blurred, distant wails from God-knows-what. You pick apart into bloody shreds everything that ever happened to you, everything you’ve ever done, and finally you make yourself stop that because soggy self-pity won’t help, only survival-oriented tough-minded hard-nosed gut will help, kid, so stop ya blubberin’ and strap on that there gun. And then you tell yourself to avoid thinking in those damn tired clichés.

  Finally you roll over and sleep, because even the pyramids don’t change having to get up early to go to work, and fix your daughter’s breakfast, and stop at the bank to pay the utility. And sometime in the night the rain starts again, smelling of phantom roses.

  In the morning the pickets were back, treading an oval on the sidewalk. Seen up close, they were an odd lot: two kids with the single scalp-strip of curled hair that is the current fashion in parent-annoyance, an intense academic type wearing middle-age badly, a woman dressed in nurse uniform, cap, and stethoscope, and an old spoonhead I had seen last week carrying a sandwich board for Harvey’s Eats. They carried a new collection of signs:

  HUMAN BOOKS FOR HUMAN HEARTS

  SAVE OUR CHILDRENS MINDS

  A C-AUD IS A COMPUTER’S BAWD

  (That was the academic.)

  IS NOTHING SACRID?

  NO SEA TO SHINING C-AUD

  “ ‘Sacred’ is misspelled,” I said, to no one in particular. One of the kids squinted at me.

  “It should be s-a-c-r-e-d.”

  He scanned the signs until he saw the one I meant, carried by the spoonhead. I ducked into the building. No one tried to stop me, although the nurse gave me the pitying look of the elect for the damned.

  Garber wasn’t in his office. My desk was cluttered with the usual jetsam, all claiming to be important.

  The computer tech wanted payment for the last set of equipment repairs.

  The utility company regretted to inform us of a rate hike.

  Ms. Ida Tidwell had submitted another application for a free-lance c-aud. This one was for a book called Tiny Tina’s Lesson. Check enclosed, drawn on a savings bank.

  Matthew McGratty wanted to explore the possibility of renegotiating our contract. He had received this offer from a well-known publisher he didn’t feel at liberty to name . . .

  I was staring at it all with profound disinterest when Garber came in. He entered quietly, gently, almost as if he were apologizing for something, or afraid of intruding on mourning.

  He looked terrible. His suit was even more rumpled than usual, his sunken blue eyes rimmed with purple shadows. I tensed, knowing he would discuss Greta, and bracing myself for—what? We had never talked directly about my writing. For unspoken pity, then. For penetrating looks and restrained curiosity. But instead Garber just laid a package on my desk.

  “Read this, Mary. Now. Please.” He didn’t look at me.

  “Garber, what—”

  “Please.”

  He turned and left, closing the door behind him. Gently.

  I opened the package. It was a manuscript, a photocopy, marked “To C. Jameson. Molloy Press. C-AUD 22, final taping.” The title was Floor of Heaven. I thought a moment, then located the title in The Merchant of Venice. The author was a name instantly recognizable, a Pulitzer Prize winner, a brilliant writer with the sort of reputation that even high school sophomores have heard of. I had reread her last book twice. What was she doing sending a manuscript to Garber, via Jameson? It made no sense.

  I began to read. Twenty pages in, I realized that, in the essentials that truly count, the characters and meaning and nuances of emotional and intellectual theme that make a book what it is, I knew the book already.

  I had read it last night.

  Garber was sitting in his office, with the lights off. He’d pulled his chair over to the window and looped back the curtain, and he sat in the half-l
ight with his hands folded on his belly, gazing out. It had started to drizzle. Far below, the corners of the pickets’ cardboard signs curled over on themselves like sea waves.

  I laid Floor of Heaven on his desk.

  “Collusion . . .” I said, the word trailing off into nothing. The author of Floor of Heaven was neither unscrupulous nor insane. No motive. More loudly I said, “A bad practical joke.” Garber didn’t answer, but I rushed on.

  “Of course, Garber. That’s all it is. Some arrested-development who’s willing to go to elaborate lengths to . . . to scare Jameson!” Only, of course, Jameson wasn’t scared. “To make him look foolish, then. Utterly, ridiculously foolish, in print.”

  Garber smiled.

  “It happens all the time. Literary hoaxes. So much a part of publishing history that it’s . . . practically obligatory, every once in a while. Patriotic, even. That’s all it is.”

  Garber gestured out the window. “They’ll be ecstatic,” he said, smiling, still smiling, and I exploded.

  “Come on, Garber, one duplication doesn’t prove anything! Even random chance allows for some total improbabilities! If all the monkeys in the British Museum began typing—no, that’s not right, if all the monkeys in the world—”

  “No,” Garber said, his voice quiet against my shrillness. “No, one duplication doesn’t prove anything.”

  “—began typing all the books in—all the books in the British . . . oh, hell, Garber.”

  “Yes,” Garber said. He was still smiling, a remote smile that made me uneasy. I looked away.

  “So what happens next?”

  The smile widened. “Jameson showed me his article. To be published next week. Quite a privilege, actually, considering who he is, and that when all this came up he thought my name was ‘Farber.’ It’s quite a story. About Plato.”

  “Plato?”

  “Plato.”

  “The ancient Greek Plato?”

  “That’s the one.”

  “How . . .” I almost had it, but it slipped my mind. A long time since college.

  “Jameson gave me a copy.” Garber opened his desk drawer, drew out a pile of paper, and pulled the third and fourth sheets. Sections were circled with thick, waxy red, and I knew that Garber must have marked it, not Jameson. Garber is probably the only company president in New York who keeps PreSchool Crayolas in his desk.