by Nancy Kress
“See the psychiatrist.”
“Don’t talk to me with that mealy-mouth superiority! Didn’t you ever make a mistake, didn’t you ever mess up a construct?”
“No, I didn’t. Lives are at stake.”
“God, you’re so smug! So sure-of-yourself prissy smug!”
“See the psychiatrist. I know what you’re thinking, Rachel——but just because it happened to D’Amato doesn’t mean it’ll happen to you.”
“And do you know what D’Amato’s doing now?” Rachel shouted. “Selling life insurance! Gone, all gone, as soon as some Freud-fly started poking around——not even you know how to get In, and you’re an initiator! Not even you——” Susan Ferrier stood in the hall, in a patch of sunlight crawling with dust motes, her hand to her mouth. Rachel jerked around and stared fiercly, pointlessly, into the linen room, her back to both of them. She could never work alone. Whatever it took to make the initial link, that catching of the unguarded dying that drew in their what?——essence? will to live? soul? Nobody knew, that was the whole damn point——whatever it took, she didn’t have it. She was only the raw energy, the lightning without a ship’s mast, the flooding river, rampaging lost beyond its banks.
“Rachel, see the psychiatrist.”
Under his even tone she heard the jaggedness that might have been pain, but when she turned his face was still controlled, closed as a fortress. Beyond him Susan Ferrier had not moved, her hand still to her mouth in the dusty sunshine. They were both such small people, such controlled, bodiless, sunlit people, so content with what they had . . . Rachel pushed past them, shoving Susan out of the way with one hand.
“I need you, Rachel,” Don said. He had climbed out of bed and stood naked on the tile floor; the top of his head reached her chin. He looked defenseless, vulnerable——deliberately vulnerable? On the floor his bony toes splayed outward.
“I need you.”
“I’d take you Under first!”
He shook his head, but whether to deny her words or just to deflect them, Rachel didn’t see. She kept on pushing down the hall, not looking back, the sunlight white and placid behind her.
She began to remember her dreams. That had never happened when she was working; it had been years since dreams had made the crossing to her conscious mind. In the night she would sit up and cry out, waking herself, sweat clammy under her nightgown. Her hands would be clenching the metal bed frame so hard the welts would stay on her palms for hours. Yet the dreams themselves were calm, ordinary: she was picking a bouquet of early asters in the garden, she was stirring the rice in its enameled pot on the stove, she was painting a window frame in her tiny Commonwealth Avenue apartment. Sunshine washed through the window and over the wet paint, making moving shadows where her hand swished back and forth. The paint smelled clean and permanent, like glue. When the frame was painted, she cleaned her brush in warm water, slapping the bristles back and forth, each separate bristle distinct and pleasantly tingling against her hands.
Hands——always hands. But she woke screaming.
During the day Rachel worked in the garden. She had chosen the shabby, cramped apartment on Commonwealth Avenue for its fenced garden, a luxury left over from the time when the Back Bay had been a pleasant, safe part of the city. Now it was neither; fights and muggings and curses echoed nightly over her wooden fence. But——there was the garden, and a tiny redwood sundeck that overlooked it. She worked frantically, jabbing her spade with the rapid-fire rhythm of a jack-hammer, or a machine gun. “Slow down, Rachel,” Don said from the sun-deck, a drink in his hand. “Slow down, you don’t have to plant Eden in one afternoon.” She scowled at the image from ten years ago and hoed the ground around her tomatoes as if rescuing them from strangulation. “Take it easy,” the image said. “All that storm and strife could kill you.”
At night she dreamed of fixing a pipe. She could feel her hands grip the wrench as it tightened on the joint collars. She woke screaming.
After a few weeks the gardening ran out. There was only so much to do. The beans had all been propped on poles; the cigarette butts and beer cans passersby had tossed over the fence had all been cleared out; the flowers had all been pruned. Rachel’s neighbors, made uneasy by the fierce order of her marigolds and the harsh measure of her scowl, left her alone.
She sat up later and later. All the curtains were drawn tightly and pinned over closed windows. She did not trust herself to even smell the summer night, heavy with lush promise——instead she watched TV news shows, hospital shows, old space dramas and even older Westerns. People were laser-fried by aliens and died. People fell off horses and died. People contracted odd strains of mutated viruses and died. Rachel watched it all, wrapped in an old hand-knitted afghan, glaring at the TV. Contestants won refrigerators, diplomats made the shuttle trip to the moon, patients fought off the odd mutated viruses and lived. Once, during a news segment about a spectacular transplant operation, she glimpsed Don in the background of the O.R., looking small and exhausted. Not even that made her turn off the TV. She let it all wash over her, staying with it right to the early morning sex shows, wanting only to stay awake, not to sleep, not to dream the calm, ordinary, useful dreams.
“MorMedic Campbell?”
“Nurse Ferrier.”
“May I come in?”
“No.”
Susan Ferrier blinked, whether at the rudeness or Rachel’s appearance, Rachel couldn’t tell. She knew how she looked. Soiled bathrobe, uncombed hair, pasty skin with dark circles under the eyes——hadn’t missed a cliché, had she? The whole theatrical repertoire of panic. Touched all the bases. At the absurdity of this flash of perverted vanity, Rachel smiled sourly and Susan, mistaking the smile, walked in.
“It’s about——well, about Don. I see him around the hospital, and he always looks so tired. Just spent. I know I probably shouldn’t interfere, MorMedic——Rachel——”
“MorMedic.”
The girl flushed. “Working alone is just too much for him. It’s really none of my business——”
“No. It’s not.”
“——but he can’t find another assistant, and frankly, I’m worried about him. He needs another assistant. He really does. But there aren’t too many of——of you.”
Rachel walked to the stove. She was out of coffee. A mug lay on its side, the last dregs soggy in the bottom. Three brown bags of garbage rotted in the sunshine from the window. She had just not been much interested in removing them. Through the glass, she could see a dented beer can caught in the rose bush.
“Of us what?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“You don’t have it. Not too many of us what? Death rats? Decay-diddlers? Infidels? Frauds? What exactly do you think MorMedics are, Nurse Ferrier?”
“Mental healers,” Susan said quietly. Rachel saw what she had missed before: dignity. The girl was timid, washed-out, bland, but she had dignity.
“Faith healers. But not their faith——ours. Does Don know you’re here?”
“No. But——”
“Presumptuous, then, isn’t it?”
“I just thought——”
“No. You didn’t.”
Susan drew a deep breath. Her oily skin mottled with red. “I’m not going to fence with you. I don’t know what you’re so angry about all the time, anyway. I don’t know why you never relax, never——but Don lost three this week. All of them should have made it. One was an eight-year-old boy.”
Rachel sat down. She lowered herself into a chair slowly, back straight, as if something were fragile.
“Tell me.”
“The first one was on Tuesday. My head nurse said it was gastric tumor, and the surgeon——”
“Not that. What was Don using with the kid.”
Susan hesitated. “I don’t know, exactly. He wouldn’t talk about it afterwards, even though he was really upset. But somebody said it was something about a cliff.”
She could feel it. Hauling the child in a rope-slin
g up the sheer face of the mountain, the body groggy but not completely inert, so that it flailed and groaned at the end of the rope. An eight-year-old would be heavy on those thin shoulders. Because he was Don, it would be cold. The snow would whip past his goggles, sometimes blinding him to the ledge above, the safe ledge which, if he only could reach it, would let him keep the kid safe——let him put the small body in the back near the rocks, under the overhang, and shield it from the wind with his own body. Would let him pull off his gloves and wipe the blood off hands raw from hauling on ropes and hammering in spikes for hours. It would have been hours. And then the unexpected shift of the rope, the child sickeningly light for the blind moment before the snow gusted and Don could see the fall, slow and unstoppable as the fall of night. At the base of the cliff, in the waiting room, the parents who had hired Don would lift their eyes from unread magazines, to scan his face as he walked toward them. And he would have to tell them. “MorMedic Campbell?”
“But Carl D’Amato is selling life insurance!”
“Who?”
Rachel closed her eyes. When she didn’t answer Susan squirmed a little, an abortive half-moment that in another girl might have been a shrug, or a flick of impatience, or a plea for attention.
“The third case was O.R. A knife-fight victim. Actually, the patient came through the surgery and we thought he would make it, but Don was still with him in post-op, and he was using the——”
“No. Don’t tell me.”
“Rachel——”
“Don’t tell me!”
Sunshine streamed in the window. Susan stood still, waiting. Rachel fidgeted, stacking the salt shaker on top of the pepper, ringing both with tom bits of advertising circular, making and unmaking frentic designs her intent eyes did not even see. The child feel from the cliff.
“All right. I’ll see your psychiatrist.”
“Oh, Don will be so——”
“Yes. Set it up for tomorrow.”
“Maybe today the doctor could fit in a——”
“Tomorrow.”
The girl nodded. They looked at each other across the littered table, Susan smiling uncertainly, Rachel fierce. There was nothing else to say. They might have been two different species, circling each other warily around the water hole of Rachel’s shabby kitchen. A fly buzzed monotonously across the sunlit silence.
“Well, I guess I better be——”
“What is death to you?” Rachel asked abruptly, and waited. She expected an evasion or an embarrassed stare, something that would justify her dislike. But again Susan surprised her. She answered promptly, meeting Rachel’s eyes directly, her uncertain smile gone.
“The enemy.”
“Always?”
“Of course.” The girl’s eyes widened suddenly. “Isn’t it always to——”
“Go home, Nurse Ferrier.”
“But——”
“Go home.”
Now even watching TV was impossible. Her mind skidded crazily, missing whole chunks of plot, entire countries’ worth of news.
“——and now the NBS newsbreak. Fighting has intensified along the Niger-Barmou border, with losses estimated as high as 4,000 men, women and children. A high official in nearby Mali, who declined to be identified, confirmed genetically altered bacteria in an attempt to gain control——”
Control, Rachel, control. You might be an initiator if you could just keep your own needs out of the metaphor.
And the great Don might be decent in bed if you’d just let any of yours in!
That wasn’t called for.
“——called for an end to the death and destruction in a Security Council Meeting earlier today. Locally, purse-snatchings and muggings in the downtown area——”
Of course it hurt. What sort of question is that? No, don’t touch there, it’s still tender.
Don——what did you feel when the mugger pulled the knife?
I felt afraid.
Is that all? Nothing more complicated, more——mixed?
Of course not.
“——return you to the Himalayas and NBS coverage via telesatellite of the death-teasing struggle of seven American mountain climbers to climb the——”
Turn it off.
I want to see it.
Good God, Rachel, why?
I don’t know. It’s beautiful. No, it’s not. It’s outrageous, dangerous, big——I don’t know. Don’t you ever think that if you weren’t a MorMedic, you might live that way? Pushing life to the limit?
Never. What’s the point?
Does there have to be a point? Maybe they’re just trying to escape all this endless cramped discontent that the rest of us live in!
I don’t feel either cramped or discontent.
God, I hate your self-righteousness!
Do you? I’m sorry. But adolescent longings for some vague passionate grandeur don’t interest me.
Self-righteous, mundane, limited——
“——limited to four days more of food and water, before facing a lingering death on this lonely Himalayan slope battered by winds of up to——”
Rachel turned off the TV. Silence filled the apartment. Hunched in her chair, pulling closely around her shoulders a shawl pointless in the summer heat, she stared at the blank screen. Beyond the drawn curtains she could feel the night, curling around the city like a sleek, stretching cat.
She dreamed she was building a new frame for the kitchen window. She chose the nail; under her fingers it felt cold and solid. She held it straight and drove it in with clean blows, her hand bringing the hammer down over the exact center of the nail head, again and again. The kitchen filled with steady, balanced pounding and with the clean smell of new wood. The windowsill was nearly finished; it lay to one side on the floor, sturdy in the sunshine. She woke screaming.
The pounding went on.
It was the wind, fiercely blowing over the vast, deserted plain outside her window, pounding at the apartment. Rachel tore open the locks on the barred grill and ran out onto the sundeck. Below her the garden lay crystalline in starlight. Beyond the fence a group of boys went by on Commonwealth Avenue, insulting each other in Spanish. A beer can was tossed over the fence, but just before it hit the dahlias the wind screamed and Rachel dropped to the deck, grabbed the railing, and hung on. She was out on the plain, alone in the howling wind. The few cottonwoods on the plain were twisted by the wind into grotesque knots. Tumbleweeds slammed into rocks that were themselves crumbled into tortured deformities by centuries of wind. A cottonwood crashed over, raking the air with branches, and the wind wailed and screamed. She would be swept away, she would be tom in half by this wind that could not exist. Not here, not at this distance, not without any contact or agreement. Not even Don could initiate such a metaphor——but it had to be Don’s, he was the only one teamed to take her In at all. But how, and why? Whom was he rescuing? Who was dying?
A sudden gale force gust slapped her from behind, hurling her hair forward over her face, blinding her. Flat on her stomach, she grabbed handfuls of the tough prairie grass and tried to raise her head enough to see where the twister was. Dirt and grit blew into her eyes, then tore at her lips and tongue when she screamed.
A night moth fluttered gently over to the dahlias, folding pale wings.
She was crawling against the wind, looking for Don. She could move only a few inches at a time, grabbing fistfuls of grass to pull herself along. The grass came up at the roots; most of it was tom from her hands by the wind. Her hair jerked abruptly away from her face and pulled at the scalp so hard it hurt. Weeds and grit howled overhead, making a tearing gray sky only inches above her head.
“Don! Don!”
He was ahead of her, a dim shape in the shrieking gloom, trying to stand up. Rachel could see his body, naked to the waist, rise a few feet above the plain. Even as she raised her head to call again he was knocked to his knees, then spun sideways a few feet and slammed to the ground. She felt rather than heard the sharp crack of bone at
the left elbow. A second later, he was trying to stagger to his knees. What was he trying to do? Where was the patient he was rescuing?
Crawling forward, Rachel reached up and pulled Don down by his belt. Instead of grasping her hand or shouting to her what was going on, Don twisted his body and clawed at her face with his one good hand. Rachel gasped and beat his hand away, finally pinning his wrist behind him. He jabbed upward with his knee but she was quicker, throwing her body full length on top of his. Her right elbow came down on his broken one; even over the demonic wind she heard him scream. Their faces were inches apart, but when he spat at her the spittle whipped away horizontally.
“Listen! Don!”
He wouldn’t hear her. Rachel’s body, ten centimeters longer and twenty kilos heavier, couldn’t hold his. The wind was lifting him from underneath, gusting up from the earth itself like some live, demented spirit.
“What the hell are you doing? The metaphor doesn’t go like this!” Rachel screamed. Don’s face strained beneath her, blank with concentration. They were three inches off the ground, locked together like rammed galleys, when Don’s head fell backward; he closed his eyes and smiled as the wind slammed him in the face. Rachel hit him in the nose. Blood spurted out and was blown by the wind. She leaned over and tried to snatch at the whipping grass, and when her fist finally closed over a clump she pulled hard. They tilted forward, her body riding his, until the grasses tore and their heads shot upward. Don’s body slid sideways under Rachel’s and she rolled off him, landing hard on the ground.
Free of her weight, Don rose another few inches. His broken left arm flopped like a puppet’s. Rachel rolled under him and grabbed upward; her arms and then her legs wrapped around Don, dragging him down to her and tightening like a vise. The hair on the back of his head lashed at her mouth, tasting of sweat. He tried to flail backwards at her with his right arm, but she was beyond his reach, and he began prying at her hands clutching his chest. She locked his fingers and squeezed until something under them cracked.
