Fictions

by Nancy Kress

  1983

  NIGHT WIN

  Night Win is Ms. Kress’s third story in IAsfm, her most recent being “Against a Crooked Stile” in the May 1979 issue. Her first novel, The Prince of Morning Bells, appeared last year from Timescape.

  The river dissolved. One minute it tore through high, dim banks booming with the rapids around the bend; the next it lifted and spread, flooding the air with gray particles that turned from water to smoke to grainy nothingness behind Rachel’s eyelids, nothingness spreading in an even wash like blindness like sleep like entropy like stillness like——“Rachel! Rachel!”

  ————nothingness————

  “Rachel!”

  Her ear muffs were yanked off so quickly that the flexible metal band snapped against her temple. She put up one hand to rub the temple, at first unaware that she did so, eyes focusing more slowly than hand. Always the eyes more slowly; the hand remembered first, not deceived. Instinct? It must be instinct. Over her chair, Don’s thin body leaned urgently. Her ear muffs dangled from his left hand. Even through the wispy nothingness she could feel the tautness in his body, gone sharp as a bowstring. If she touched him she would bleed. “Rachel?”

  The hospital room sprang into focus: metal bed, tightly woven blue blanket, blue-flowered drapes drawn against the night, miniature plants in a green ceramic pot, a gift from somebody. Dracaena, jade plant, philodendron, schefflera. The schefflera was wilting; probably over-watered. Under the blue blanket Rachel could see Mrs. Angstrom lying still, worn out with not dying.

  “Are you all right?”

  “I——lost it,” Rachel said. She closed her eyes, then forced them open again. Sounds, always the last to focus, came leaking in from the corridor: a linen cart rolling by, an elevator door opening with a soft whoosh of air. At the nurse’s station around the corner and down the hall someone chuckled. A second later a different voice murmured, the words indecipherable as a foreign language. Somewhere a phone rang.

  “Rachel——can you get back In?”

  “Can you?”

  “Yes. But now. It has to be now.”

  Sweat beaded on his upper lip. One hand, Rachel saw, was shaking. Always the hands——even for Don, who had so much control she sometimes hated him.

  “It wasn’t like the last time,” Rachel said slowly. “This was——nothingness. Just nothingness. I lost it to nothingness.” Her big body shuddered.

  “There’s no time. It has to be now!”

  In the bed Mrs. Angstrom groaned and turned over.

  “All right,” Rachel said. “All right. I’m ready.”

  Don took her hand. She pulled it away, but then forced herself to leave it in his. He was right; she needed the extra contact, even at the price of the tactile distraction. His fingers were spindly and cold. With her free hand Rachel pulled the ear muffs over her head, leaned back, and closed her eyes.

  She slipped in.

  The raft had drifted farther towards the rapids——how had it gotten so far downstream? Don was splashing towards it, only his bony, naked shoulders and bobbing head showing above the slimy black water. Another ten yards and he would reach the raft, but the water flowed faster here and his splashing was not narrowing the distance. On the raft Mrs. Angstrom screamed, but Rachel heard no sound; the woman’s mouth was a silent black O. Rachel tried to move towards Don, but the water pressed in, stinging like needles. Cold——it was so cold. She tried to raise the temperature, but the water would not warm. Don must need it this cold; she couldn’t affect it at all.

  Ahead of her Don reached the raft and grasped it with both hands at one corner. For a second Rachel could feel the wood, water-logged and spongy, bucking under his hands. Hands——not now! Don’t think of hands now! Don braced himself against an underwater rock, leaning backwards until his weight balanced the forward drag of the current against the raft, and called back over his shoulder for Rachel to help pull.

  Her body, so big and ponderous on land, felt light in the water. Her breasts, blue-veined and fatty, floated in front of her. But the stinging was growing even worse; the water was so cold it burned. Rachel struggled to make herself take a step, to move through the black water over the unseen sand underneath. Just as she succeeded in lifting her naked foot and shoving it forward, a fish swam by her legs.

  Startled, she stopped moving. A fish? There couldn’t be a fish, not here, not in this river. And it was beautiful——tapering slim shape and crimson dark scales, streaking across the dark water. But how could a fish have been——

  “Rachel!”

  “I’m coming!”

  She splashed forward, flailing her arms. The raft had swung sidewise under Don’s backward pull. One corner pointed directly down the river, like a prow. Mrs. Angstrom was still screaming, and now Rachel could hear her over the rapids, a shrill scream with a scraping flutter in it, doubling and redoubling in echoes off the bluffs that crowded the river on both sides. Around her the slimy water moved faster, singing darkly.

  Don’s skin felt clammy with gooseflesh. Rachel forced her hands around his waist and threw her weight backwards. He staggered, but then caught her rhythm and stepped back with her over the jagged rocks. (Jagged rocks? It had been sand when she started. Rocks, cold——why did he make everything as goddamn hard as possible?) The muscles in the back of Don’s neck knotted with each step. Slowly the raft eased backward, moving upstream, against the current.

  Mrs. Angstrom went on screaming.

  They were almost back to where Rachel stood before, angling in towards a rock shelf at the foot of the bluff, when a fish swam by again. Suddenly there were two of them, slashing the coldness with bright streaks of warm color. She tried to yell to Don to look at the fish, but he didn’t turn his head. Wood chips from the raft, smelling of rot and slime, hung in his hair.

  How quick the fish were! How alive and yet not alive, glowing with passionate flashes of red, more intense than any color she had ever seen. More intense than any being she had ever seen——pure, whole, free, and with a passion glimpsed only in night dreams. Passionately red. Streaking across the nigh blackness, burning deeper and deeper, the searing crimson flaring out like a nova until the water itself was warmed. How could she have thought it was cold? It was only cold until you were used to it, then warm and bright with the glow, the yearning, the flowing between your legs like black velvet. Red fins and slim tapering bodies leading you down into the sweet silent water, the longed-for, half-remembered temperature, salty and thick, warm as blood.

  She let go of Don and slipped in a slow sliding curve under the blood-warm water.

  “MorMedic Campbell. Come on, now, wake up. This is Nurse Ferrier. Wake up, now.”

  The young voice trying to be old went on and on, patiently. Rachel turned over and tried to pull the blanket over her head.

  “None of that. Come on, MorMedic——Rachel. Wake up, now. Please wake up.”

  A hand began slapping her hesitantly on the cheeks, first the left one, then the right. When Rachel reached up to bat the hand away it caught her wrist and pulled a little.

  “Rachel, come on. You’re supposed to wake up now.”

  “I’m awake.”

  “Then open your eyes. Please open your eyes.”

  The face was leaning over her, blocking the window. Chubby cheeks, blond curls, oily skin: Rachel recognized her as the latest of the young nurses who followed Don around, smiling wistfully. Sarah, Sandy——Susan. Susan something. The nurse moved her head and Rachel was assaulted by sunlight, then memory. Abruptly she sat up.

  “Mrs. Angstrom——”

  “Alive. The fever broke. She’s over the worst.”

  “She’ll make it?”

  “The prognosis is hopeful,” the nurse said primly. The corners of her young mouth turned down. Rachel saw the grimace for what it was: the involuntary distrust of the technician of the body for the technician of the mind, of the concrete for the shadowy, of the dutifully licensed for the hired outsider. Probably Nu
rse Ferrier didn’t even notice what her mouth was doing; that didn’t help.

  Why the hell were they like that? It seemed to Rachel that nearly all of them, all the hospital personnel and the academic researchers and even the next-of-kin who paid for the services of a Mortality Medical Team, spent most of their living energies in wilful, edgy misunderstanding of what that team did.

  Not that there was much about metaphorical healing that was concrete enough to understand. So many unknowns: how did MorMedics ease themselves into synchronous trance? How did they wordlessly choose and construct a metaphor for death, and then ensnare the minds of the dying into becoming passive participants in the metaphor? How did they pull the dying back from the idea of death, and why should the body often follow the idea? Often, so often, but not always. Why not always? Why at all? Why this, why that, why was this stupid girl standing here blushing at her, why, why——

  Why did I let go of the raft?

  “Of course,” Susan Ferrier said awkwardly, “I know I don’t understand any of it. I didn’t mean to imply——I know that Don——MorMedic Bareis——he does wonderful work. So many people have said they——not that there’s any way of knowing it wasn’t just the basic medical care that wasn’t really the cause for——but he really does give it everything he’s got. He really tries. And you, too, of course,” she added hastily.

  “Of course,” Rachel said sourly, and swung her heavy legs over the side of the bed.

  “Let me help you. Do you feel all right?”

  “You couldn’t do anything about it if I didn’t,” Rachel said, and waited for the girl to take offense. But instead she smiled, a smile so patient and open that it changed her whole face, making even the bad skin a shiny reflection for the sunlight that filled the room, a meek acceptance of whatever was offered. Rachel felt dimly ashamed; she scowled and looked away.

  Don lay in an empty bed parked in an unused alcove by the linen room. He was still asleep. Lying on his left side, his legs drawn up, he looked even smaller than usual. Where did it come from, all that power in that delicate, balding skull with the last sideburns in Boston? His right shoulder hunched up toward his chin; Rachel could see where the collarbone, chicken-skinny, met the shoulder. Such delicate shoulders; so much unseen, over-regulated power.

  Holding those shoulders in her arms had never been able to excite her. She had tried——God knows she had tried, wanting to make their obligatory intercourse something more than the required playing through of common sexual metaphors. Her metaphors, violent and restless, had repelled him; his metaphors, stately and secretive, had bored her. Or maybe his had never really surfaced at all, never really broken through all that awesome control. Always that control, that careful consideration of ends rather then means. Not that she didn’t admire it professionally, of course. But in all six months that they had lived together, she had never had an orgasm. She had come to know Don through and through, and nowhere had she found that abandonment, that complexity, that passionate struggle that might have made her respond to him. She had lain next to him, holding him as she gazed out his window at the night clouds whipping over Boston Bay, and it had been like holding a child in her arms.

  But, free of sexual metaphors, they had made such ideal working partners! His the initiation and control, hers the passion and energy. They were the best team on the East Coast, once they had worked at an operation on a former president of United Europe. But that had been years ago; she had never lost the metaphor then, never given in to——what?

  Leaning against the wall of the linen room, Rachel felt the sour little bubbles rise in her stomach, and scowled. She hated, above all else, the rare times she felt afraid.

  Don was awake. He lay looking at her, his light gray eyes compassionate.

  “I’m sorry, Don. I lost it. I was with you and then I just . . . lost it.”

  “Rachel——”

  “No. Don’t. I know.”

  He looked away from her, into the linen room. Crumpled sheets lay in a pile on the floor. His small, delicate-veined hand clenched at his side, and she spoke quickly, anything, before he could speak.

  “How did you get the raft to shore?”

  “I didn’t.”

  “Then——”

  “It happened to snag on a rock, so I left it to pull you out. The rock wasn’t mine. Yours?”

  “You know better than that.”

  “Then it must have been hers. Latent ability, maybe, I don’t know——it was just sheer luck. The one-in-a-thousand chance. Not something I could count on again. Rachel——”

  “Was I hard to get out?”

  “No. You had already swallowed enough water by the time I could grab you.”

  “Did Mrs. Angstrom try at all to——”

  “Rachel. Stop it.”

  “Don’t tell me what I can ask or not ask about a——”

  “I can’t work with you any more.”

  She looked at him. Somewhere, down the hall, around a corner where she couldn’t see, a patient coughed.

  “Don’t look at me like that, Rachel. Rachel——”

  Why were people always doing that, always starting their speeches to her with her name? Nobody else was addressed so much by name. Did they think it gained them something: time, her attention, her favor? Fools. She hated her name. “Rachel, weeping for her children, because they are no more . . .” She fought, not wept. It was the wrong metaphor.

  “Rachel, at least listen to me. To start with, you need some time off, a few weeks to rest. Tiredness——”

  “If you know I was tired, why did you use the river? You knew I have trouble with all the water constructs, we’ve been over this a hundred times, yet you go right ahead and use it anyway, you don’t seem to——”

  “Don’t attack, Rachel. Attacking won’t help.”

  “ ‘Attack’. God, you even talk in metaphors.”

  He passed a hand over his eyes, but he wasn’t deterred. They had worked together for fourteen years, had been mortal friends for twelve.

  “A rest would do you——”

  “No, it wouldn’t. I’d go crazy. I need to work, you know that!”

  “You could do some of your gardening, take a trip. Visit your sister in Detroit.”

  “I can’t stand my sister in Detroit. I need to work.”

  “So take a job at an algae factory!” Don snapped, and despite the panic in her stomach, Rachel grinned. It still had the power to surprise her, this unexpected exasperation that could break the surface of his bland, slow patience. Impulsively she reached out and put a hand on his shoulder.

  “No, Rachel. I mean it. Mrs. Angstrom, and last week the brain surgery. Shapiro.”

  “They both pulled through!”

  “You deserted me in the middle. Shapiro wasn’t water, either.”

  It had been night, the oldest metaphor of all. Don and she had crouched on a vast plain, plying enormous bellows, pumping toward a tiny spark of fire on a pile of messy ashes. They leaned on hands and knees to blow with exhausted breaths until the veins in her cheeks swelled and popped. The plain had been dark, cave-coffin-womb dark, except for that wavering spark from the inert mass on the operating table. And then suddenly Rachel had seen how much more beautiful the velvety darkness was, how much more pregnant with mysterious huntings and yeamed-for promises, than the grotesque shadows cast by the grubby little spark. The most natural, the rightest thing in the world, was to turn her back on the dingy ashes and face the spacious, gravid, sweet-scented dark, just face it and listen for what it surely had to whisper to her, what unfettered vast secrets——she hated O.R. work, anyway. The electronic instruments were a subtle distraction, their rhythms never exactly matching the ones Don set, and so were all those others, the endless personnel which conventional medicine thought it needed, moving and talking and breathing and filling up the crowded room with their petty static. It was no wonder she’d lost the metaphor! So many of them, always, you’d think an operation was a goddamn foot
ball game, all spectators welcome. Next time she should sell tickets. Next time she——

  “You don’t just need a rest, anyway, Rachel. Let’s not argue about the rest. What you need, the second thing——the most important thing——is an analysis.”

  “No.”

  “This is serious. I can’t risk your going out on me with a patient again. Will you at least talk to a psychiatrist about this weird death wish——”

  “Spare me the pop jargon!”

  “If you——”

  “Why do you push me on the same stupid thing? We’ve been over this a hundred times! No, no, no!”

  Don sat up in the bed. The blanket slipped and Rachel saw the thin gray scar on his chest, souvenir of a mugging in the Public Gardens on his way home from an emergency night operation. Over the years she had raged against that chest, storming as various men had let her down, had turned out to be only pygmy gusts instead of the nature-shaping gales she had thought them, had after all not been enough for her. Not been large enough. Don had always been there, always listened, contained and patient, waiting for the passing of emotional storms he never shared.

  “I push you on the same thing because I have to, Rachel. Now be rational. If you go under when we’re on a crucial case where I can’t let——”

  “Analysis won’t help!”

  “How can you say that when you haven’t even——”

  “No, damn it! No, no, no!”

  “Rachel——if you don’t have an analysis you don’t work with me.

  “Fine! I’ll find another partner!”

  He drew a deep breath. The scar on his chest quivered under the flourescent light.

  “If you don’t have an analysis, you don’t work.”

  “You can’t——”

  “Yes. I can.”

  She flung out one arm, the gesture meaningless, and struck a shelf beside her. Glass shattered; metal clattered to the floor. Unheeding, Don looked at her directly, those gray eyes that absorbed light steady in his delicate face. He looked absurd, like a child playing king, playing petty dictator, playing with the only thing in her stupid life vital enough to mean anything. He looked like a scrawny chicken, trying to outface a falling cliff. She could snap those twiggy little bones with one hand, she could crush him right where he lay.