Fictions

by Nancy Kress

  “I know that,” said Dr. Stine, Chairman of the Graduate Committee. He sat behind his book-cluttered desk in his book-lined office and looked distressed. Beyond the open window three students, exhilarated by the spring, were tossing a blue frisbee; occasionally it hit the building with a soft clunk muffled by budding ivy.

  “They both knew my novel was going to be s—”

  “I know that, too, Mr. Casey.” The chairman’s distress was genuine. Casey didn’t care. “We are not narrow in our academic outlook, Mr. Casey. There is room for many different types of writing in our creative thesis option. The graduate committee is perfectly aware that a lot of exciting research is being carried out right now in your field and that there is much literary merit in selected examples of sci-fi.” Casey winced. Dr. Stine didn’t notice. The frisbee hit the wall.

  “We’re also aware that Ph.D.’s are being granted by very prestigious universities for scholarly work in sci-fi. But both the writing and the research ends that are worthy of serious attention concern the best sci fi, the work concerned with social insight and human verities. Hawthorne’s ‘truth of the human heart, you know,’ ” the chairman said, and smiled, obviously pleased with this reference. The frisbee hit the wall.

  “Your novel, on the other hand, is just—just adventure. Escapist improbabilities. You must see—‘galactic empire’ !”

  “It’s a realistic interpretation of a possible technological—”

  “Precisely. Technological, not humane. You don’t deal with psychological or social themes at all. When your protagonist meets those aliens in the blue UFO—blue—I’m sorry, Mr. Casey. It’s not that your novel is badly written. In fact, it shows some commercial promise; it’s colorful and fast-paced. But it doesn’t measure up to the standards of serious fiction. And serious literature is what a thesis-novel acceptable to the English department, must at least try to be.”

  “It could very well happen just the way I—”

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Casey. I wish you would believe that.” Casey did believe it. He uttered a short expletive that he hoped made the chairman even sorrier, and left the book-lined office just as the frisbee missed the wall altogether and sailed through the window, a miniature blue UFO.

  He resigned from the university, regretted it as pretentiously self-indulgent, and stayed resigned. To fill his time, he wrote, waited on tables at a local pizzeria, brooded over his rejection slips, and walked. The walking, he figured, was the best thing he did. He could walk for hours, could walk all night. After a while he no longer needed to look down at his own feet in even the darkest, most unfamiliar woods; his feet developed such sure sensing of the dead twigs and leaf-covered rabbit holes that he never stumbled. He could walk looking upward at the stars which, in some way, he couldn’t say just exactly how, had betrayed him. He could walk on desert sands, on ancient glaciers, on the bottom of the Mariana Trench. His walking was a definite A.

  “Hey, Casey!”

  “Hello, Rizzo. What’ll you have?”

  “What do you want, Darlene?”

  “Oh, I don’t know—pepperoni, for sure. Mushrooms, green pepper, onions. And anchovies, if they’re fresh. Are the anchovies fresh?”

  “Are the anchovies fresh?” Rizzo asked Casey.

  “No,” Casey said.

  “Well, then, no anchovies. OK, Dari?”

  “Are they good frozen anchovies?” Rizzo asked Casey. “No,” Casey said.

  “So what are you doing now?” Rizzo said, and added hastily, without glancing around the pizzeria, “What are you going to do? I mean your, uh, plans?”

  “Bring you a pizza without anchovies,” Casey said, saw that he was being a bastard again, and tried harder. “Guess what, Rizzo? I sold one.”

  Rizzo wrinkled his beefy forehead. “One what?”

  “One story. I sold one.”

  “You did? Hey, that’s great! Is it . . . is it one of those—”

  “Yes. Yes, it is.”

  “Well, that’s still great! Do you mind if I ask you what you got for it? No, never mind. None of my business.”

  “It wasn’t much.”

  “I hear that market pays less. Comparatively.”

  “Generally, yes. There are exceptions.”

  “Of course—there always are. Speaking of exceptions, do you mind if I brag a little? I got a job. A real, tenure-track, full-time job. Starting as assistant professor “Congratulations. Where is it?”

  “Lunell College. It’s a small liberal arts college in Massachusetts. I really lucked out, you know what the market is, nobody wants humanities people. Only technology-gadget guys, computer specialists and all. But this is a bona fide good deal. Guess what the salary is.”

  “I couldn’t.”

  “Go ahead, guess.”

  “I couldn’t.”

  Rizzo told him. Casey smiled and underlined “no anchovies” on his order pad, thick and black. Twice. The pencil broke.

  “I really did luck out,” Rizzo said. “They just happened to need a Keats man.”

  He had not forgotten his childhood nomenclature for the stars, but now he learned everyone else’s. This was easy because there seemed to be fewer stars than there had been in Montana. He wrote out a list of the more mellifluous ones, set the list to the melody of a sixteenth-century English madrigal, and chanted it while he walked:

  Regulus Fomalhaut Betelguese

  Ri - i - gel,

  Arcturus Polaris Cano - o - pus

  Al - TAIR.

  The chant stayed in his head while he tried to write about galactic empires and interstellar battles; since he couldn’t get the tune out, he learned to ignore it. After a while he found it rather soothing and came to depend upon it while he sweated and thrashed and fought, motionless at his Salvation Army desk.

  The actual presence of real stars was less soothing. Nightly he glared upwards, weather permitting, with real anger, while summer dew soaked his sneakers and a crick developed at the back of his neck. He didn’t try to understand his anger; it was more satisfying to revel in it. They had let him down, Regulus Fomalhaut Betelguese Ri-i-gel. They had all let him down. They had not delivered, somehow, what had been promised, promised to the Montana kids playing on the big flat rock in the middle of prosperous insignificance: Marty Hillek and Carl Nielsen and Billy DeTine and Jerry Casey, playing UFO and Sirian Invaders and Would-You-Go? They had deceived. They were not what he thought them. They had refused to let him go, as they had let Marty Hillek and Carl Nielsen and Billy DeTine go, but they had also refused to satisfy him. They were heartless, they were cold, they were shallow, and he himself was probably crazy to stand here thinking of them as anything but ongoing nuclear fusions. “Many thynges doth infect the ayre, as the influence of sondry sterres,” he quoted aloud, enormously pleased to have remembered the quote from Renaissance Lit. He only quoted aloud when in deserted areas, however; his angry craziness demanded privacy to be fully wallowed in. It was a lover’s quarrel.

  “Jerry! Happy birthday, dear!”

  “Thanks, mom.”

  “So how does it feel to be twenty-six, son?”

  “Oh, I don’t know, dad. Not too different from twenty-five.”

  “Your presents are in the mail, dear. I’m sorry they didn’t get East by your birthday, but I just couldn’t get to town to the post office; the car was acting up, and your father couldn’t figure out if it was the starter or that little black thing that goes from the—”

  “Now, Mary, we don’t need to tell him all that long distance.”

  “Guess not. How’s everything going, dear?”

  “Fine, just fine.”

  “Did you sell any more—”

  “No. No, I haven’t. It takes time, you know, mom.” Fourteen hundred miles away, his father cleared his throat. Jerry held the receiver a little away from his ear and closed his eyes, waiting.

  “Speaking of selling, son, I happened to talk to John Nielsen yesterday, and he still needs someone to help him and Carl at th
e Grain & Feed. Now I’m not pressuring you, you know that. Whatever you want to do is fine with your mother and me. That’s what we’ve always said, and we mean it. But I just promised John I’d pass along the information to you, so I am.

  “Okay,” Casey said. “The information is passed.” He could see his father holding the phone—the upstairs extension, it would be—lightly in his big hand, still wearing his stetson with his boots and plaid flannel shirt.

  “Just so’s you know, son.”

  “I know,” Casey said. There was a pause.

  “Are you still seeing that girl, dear, that you wrote us about? The kindergarten teacher? Kara Phillips?”

  “Yes. No. A little.”

  “I have an idea! Why don’t you bring her with you when you come home for Christmas? You know, we’d just love to have her!”

  “Now, Mary, don’t push,” Casey’s father said.

  “I wasn’t pushing, Calvin Casey! All I said was that we’d love to have Jerry’s friend stay with us over Christmas, if he’d like to bring her. She could have the spare room, it was just freshly papered, it’d be no trouble at all.”

  “Thanks, mom. Maybe I’ll ask her.”

  “Of course, it’s up to you. Write us when your presents arrive, so I know they fit, and tell us if Kara is coming for Christmas.”

  “Assistant manager,” his father said. “Did I mention that it’s assistant manager?”

  “Well, bye, dear. Happy birthday!”

  “Good starting salary, son.”

  “Love you,” Casey’s mother said.

  “Love you, too,” Casey said, and hung up the receiver carefully, with no sound.

  He quit the pizzeria. One night in October he had waited on the Chairman of the Graduate Committee, Dr. Stine. The man had been so tactful, so diplomatic in chatting with Casey without once mentioning Casey’s failed novel-thesis, Casey’s inexpert self-haircut ($4.70 at the barber, and that without sideburns), Casey’s tomato-and-mozzarella smeared apron, that Casey had been unable to stand it. He smiled at the chairman, said yes, fall was beautiful in this part of the country, said yes, it was interesting that the papers always reported an increase in UFO sightings in the fall, said no, he didn’t think there was anything in it. Then he went into the kitchen and stuffed his apron into the pizza oven, where it turned the exact color of flabby frozen anchovies.

  He found a job as part-time grounds man for an old, beautiful, tree-shaded cemetery. He wrote all morning and raked leaves all afternoon, avoiding funerals in progress. The metal rake prongs caught repeatedly at the bases of tombstones and then twanged back, a sound as monotonous and hypnotic as a pendulum. Sometimes he returned late at night and walked through the cemetery. The darkness was rich and velvety; it was the quick flashes of headlights beyond the iron gates that seemed like the ghosts. He read the oldest of the tombstones with a penlight, stooping to trace the letters with his finger when age had made them illegible:

  ELIZABETH ANN CARMODY

  1851-1862

  Eleven years old, he thought. At eleven years old he had been playing Would You Go? on the big flat rock on the plains. Eleven years old.

  JAMES ALLEN ROBERTS

  1789-1812

  DULCE ET DECORUM EST PRO PATRIA MORI

  Ha, snorted Casey, child of draftcard burnings and ping-pong detente.

  CECILIA HARDWICK SMITH

  1884-1879

  BEYOND THIS NARROW VALE OF EARTH

  WHERE BRIGHT CELESTIAL AGES ROLL

  THE COUNTLESS STARS OF HEAVEN’S REALM

  GUIDE AND LIGHT THE WAND’RING SOUL

  Ha again, Casey told the stars, the lover’s quarrel having solidified into the cynical half-banter of an accepted marriage. So go ahead, guide and light. Send down knowledge. Send down enlightenment. Send down a publisher. Go ahead, I’m waiting, I’m a wandering soul, as duly specified, I’m ready. H—has arisen. Go ahead.

  Clouds started to roll in from the west.

  “And she said to tell you that it would be no trouble at all, you could have the spare bed in the spare room, and they’d love to have you.”

  Kara raised herself on one elbow in Casey’s rumpled, unspare bed. The neon barber pole just outside Casey’s window striped her breasts with revolving red and blue.

  “I don’t think it’s fair of you to change the subject in the middle of a discussion just because you’re losing.”

  “I was losing?”

  “You know you were. And then you just drop in this invitation to your parents’ house for Christmas, and that really puts me at an emotional disadvantage, Jer. It’s not fighting fair.”

  “So report me to the Geneva Convention.”

  “There you go, getting nasty again, de-railing the argument just because you haven’t got a valid viewpoint that won’t stand up to close scrutiny.”

  “I haven’t got a valid viewpoint that will stand up to close scrutiny? And what is it you’ve got, an airtight case?”

  “I didn’t say that. I said—”

  “More like a braintight case.”

  “—that not being able to prove that a thing exists isn’t the same as being able to prove that it doesn’t exist, and—”

  “Absolutely impervious to the osmosis of facts.”

  “—just because the Navy doesn’t choose to admit that a UFO—”

  “Last month it was transactional analysis.”

  “That was different! If you’d just have an open mind—”

  “With enough holes to fit the airtight case in?”

  “That’s enough!” Kara shouted. She bolted upright in bed and clutched Casey’s grubby sheet around her. “You’re so superior, aren’t you, with your clever little wisecracks about my intelligence! Just because you’ve never seen one, they don’t exist, right? If Jerry Casey, great unpublished novelist, hasn’t personally seen and touched and goddamn tasted a UFO, then there’s no such thing. Of course not! No matter that hundreds of sightings have been reported, no matter that a respected witness right here in town saw a ship streaking over the woods, no matter that there doesn’t—if Jerry Casey didn’t see it, it doesn’t exist, because Jerry Casey is the great fictional expert on spaceships and galactic empires! If Jerry Casey, with three unpublished novels and the enormous authority of his sacred pile of rejection si—”

  Casey hit her. It wasn’t a hard slap, he didn’t know he was going to do it until he had, and instantly he regretted it more than he had ever regretted anything else in his life. Kara put her hand to her red cheek and turned away from him, the sheet twisting itself around her small striped breasts. Tears filled her eyes but did not fall. Casey put out one hand to touch her shoulder, but he couldn’t make the hand quite connect and it hung there, suspended between them, useless.

  “Kara . . . oh God, Kara, I’m sorry.”

  She didn’t answer. The sheet humped up over her thin legs. Something broke in Casey, something so light and delicate he hadn’t known himself that it was there, or what he would say when it wasn’t.

  “Kara, listen, I’m sorry I hit you, so fucking sorry I don’t know how to say it. But, Kara, you don’t know, you can’t know, I’ve wanted there to be something out there since I was a kid, wanted it more desperately than anything else in my whole fucking life. I used to stand out there on the plains and squeeze my eyes shut and will them to be out there, to come down to me, because I was one of them. I knew it, so they had to know it, too. I made up whole stories, epics, about how I got left here by mistake and adopted by my parents, but they’d come back for me eventually. It was so real I could taste it, Kara, could shiver with it down to my bones, my marrow. It was like a religion, or an insanity. And I still would like to believe, would give fucking anything to believe, but I can’t. The evidence against it is just too strong. Do you know what the odds are that intelligent life would behave like . . . so I started to convince myself that the stories were just made up. I started to make them up, to write them down. Kara, it’s not ‘superiority,’ it’
s not wisecracks, it’s . . . Kara, do you see what I’m talking about? Can you understand what I’m trying to mean? Kara?”

  She didn’t answer. After a while he touched her. She put her head on his shoulder. He wiped her tears. She let him. He stroked her hair and apologized all over again. She said it was all right, looking pensive and thoughtful. He pulled the blanket protectively up to her chin. She lay still in his arms. He kissed her. She smiled. A few days later she called and said they should have a long talk. He never saw her again.

  Paul Rizzo was getting married, and he wrote to invite Casey to the wedding. His bride was a fellow faculty member at Lunell College—an assistant professor, Rizzo wrote, underlining the words twice. She was also “the only child of a wealthy shoe polish entrepreneur.” Casey tried to figure out how you got really wealthy from shoe polish, couldn’t, and knew that this proved nothing. He wouldn’t have known how to become really wealthy if the process were detailed for him in heroic couplets. For all he knew, shoe polish was a rewarding and fulfilling way to make money enough to freshly wallpaper all the spare rooms in Montana. For all he knew, shoes and the right polish were what his life had been missing all along, the yin and yang of his universe’s deficiencies. For all he knew.

  With his letter Rizzo had enclosed a picture of his fiancée, cut from the local newspaper which had announced their engagement. She looked pretty, if a little blurry. The invitation was embossed with blue-and-white doves swooping around a quotation from Keats.

  Tramping along over the hard Montana snows on Christmas night, Casey tried to picture the wedding. There would be champagne, and sexy-coy toasts, and good food. There would be women—bridesmaids in silky dresses, Lunell professors with good minds, college-student relatives giggly and flushed with wine. The wedding was in April, over Easter recess, so the bridesmaids and professors and gigglers would have on spring dresses, light and bare. They would smell of flowery perfumes. They would dance on strappy, high-heeled sandals. They would talk to Casey on the dance floor, at the bar, on the church steps. And they would all ask him, eventually, what it was that he “did.” Or tried to do. Or was supposed to be doing.