Fictions

by Nancy Kress

  A child requested an explanation for the death of her puppy. A young man, all knobby elbows and tortured dark eyes, wanted a causal explanation for the presence of evil in the world. Another young man wanted to know the procedure for making a killing on the stock market, but he was turned away: Explanations, Inc., did not handle procedural explanations for events that had not yet happened. A woman asked for an explanation of an old and trivial social slight, twenty-three years earlier, for which she was willing to pay a sum greater than Harkavy’s yearly salary. She could not be dissuaded: “I have to know why she acted like that to me. I have to know why!”

  After she had left, Harkavy said—the first time he had spoken in ten days—to Stone, “ ‘The heart has reasons of which the reason knows nothing.’ ”

  “Pascal.”

  Harkavy scowled. He had not expected Stone to know.

  Stone said, “Even the reasons of the heart can be explained. The truth of the causes is not dependent on the absurdity of the results.”

  “Nor of their emotional manageability?”

  “Certainly not,” Stone said.

  Another customer appeared at the door, hand hesitating on the knob, face peering through the glass storefront.

  “All these questions,” Harkavy said.

  “All these questions,” Stone said. Harkavy scowled and went back to silence. In the deep purple chair, Harkavy felt invisible, witness but not participant, a noncombatant temporarily removed from action. Customers ignored him. He was part of the furniture. He was always cold.

  Between one afternoon and the following morning, the gritty linoleum disappeared, replaced by an Oriental carpet luminously and intricately woven in shades of wine, purple, deep blue. The ground beneath Harkavy’s feet glowed like jewels.

  “Explain,” Harkavy said, “the reason for the universe.” Stone went on doing something behind the counter. “Explain,” Harkavy said more loudly, rising finally from his chair, “the reason for the universe!”

  “Mr. Harkavy,” Stone said formally, as though Harkavy had just entered the shop. He had, in fact, been sitting in the purple chair for over a month. The cushions bore overlapping imprints of his body, one for each restless position.

  “I wish a contract,” Harkavy said, almost resentfully, “to explain the universe.”

  “Then I take it that you have become convinced of the validity of Explanations, Inc., despite your first impressions?” Harkavy ground his teeth. “Can we get on with it!”

  “Certainly,” Stone said. “How the universe was formed?”

  “Why.”

  “Ah,” Stone said. To Harkavy the word sounded drawn out and sibilant, like a sigh, despite having no s’s in it. The twilight noncape rustled softly.

  “Well?” Harkavy said. “Can you explain that?”

  “Yes.”

  “Need we define many terms?”

  “No. The terms are clear.”

  “Will it be expensive?”

  “No. Very cheap.”

  “Will it take long to prepare the answer?”

  “Only a few minutes.”

  “Then,” Harkavy said, “it must be a question asked often.”

  “Very often.”

  “And I will receive a stock explanation?”

  “You will receive a true explanation.”

  “All right, then,” Harkavy said tonelessly. His face had gone rather gray. Stone’s face did not change expression, and as Harkavy wrote out the check, he had the sudden thought that, seen through the glass from the sidewalk, they might have been two ordinary businessmen engaged in any of the more well-bred trades, insurance or pharmaceuticals or law.

  Stone brought his explanation from whatever place lay behind the door beyond the counter. It was very detailed, a sheaf of closely printed papers. Harkavy, unfamiliar with this terminology but familiar with universal academic style, stood quietly as he scanned the abstracts by great physicists. Radial velocities, the Hubble law, the cosmologic principle, Big Bang micro-radiation, law of entropy.

  “This is a procedural explanation, Stone. It explains how the universe came into being. I requested why.”

  “Yes,” Stone said simply, and said no more.

  Harkavy understood. The procedure was the cause. The universe existed because it existed. No more than that. Harkavy said loudly, “I don’t really care, you know.” Stone said nothing.

  “It isn’t as if it were more than an intellectual exercise, or as if I didn’t already know this. My God, man, Sartre—I teach sophomores who have figured all this out for themselves, some of them, and not the brightest ones, either!”

  “Please don’t shout,” Stone said.

  “I was right all along!”

  “Yes.”

  “God! All those poor saps trailing in here, all those suckers, thinking there was a point to what they choose to do!” Stone was silent.

  “I suppose the proper philanthropic response is pity, isn’t it? But I don’t pity ignorance, Stone. Nor illusions. A mind that does not think is an ugly thing. Not pitiful—ugly. Does that shock you?”

  “No.”

  Harkavy’s voice rose louder again. “But I suppose you think that just because I asked that question, I must be devastated by the answer. I knew the explanation all along. It was you I was testing!”

  “Then I trust we have proved ourselves reliable.”

  “It doesn’t matter to me! The explanation doesn’t matter to me!”

  “Ah,” said Stone.

  “I was right!” Harkavy shrieked. He tore the sheaf of documentation in half, then in half again and yet again. Pieces of paper drifted down onto the carpet. “I was right! There are no real explanations!”

  “There are two more questions,” Stone said, but Harkavy didn’t hear him. He was gone, storming out of the shop, leaving the bits of paper littered over the glowing depths of the carpet, scattered as random stars.

  “I would like to apologize,” Harkavy said stiffly. He stood holding the counter with both hands. Since yesterday the counter seemed to have deepened in color. “I do not usually behave so badly. I do not usually lose my temper in quite that fashion. Therefore, I would like to apologize.”

  “Your apology is accepted,” Stone said gravely. He gazed at Harkavy with a thoughtful intensity. Harkavy felt ridiculous.

  “I think you should know,” he said, “that I have contacted both the Better Business Bureau and the Consumer Protection League.”

  “Yes?” Stone said. He did not look alarmed. “Explanations, Inc., is registered with neither.”

  “No.”

  “But neither organization has received any complaints concerning you.”

  “No.”

  “Until now,” Harkavy added.

  “Ah.”

  “You don’t believe me, do you? You don’t believe I filed a complaint with the bureaucracy.”

  “No,” Stone said. He did not smile back. Harkavy leaned over the counter, his back to the purple velvet chair, and waited to see if Stone would say anything that would let him, Harkavy, leave. Stone said nothing. The silence lengthened. Finally, Harkavy shifted his weight, crossed one leg over the opposite calf, and tried, desperately, for nonchalance.

  “So when did you paint the ceiling?” he said heartily. Stone did not look upward. The ceiling, which by some trick of lighting now looked very far away, was a deep, glowing wine. Between ceiling and carpet the tiny shop hung suspended, mysterious with jeweled color. In the window the passionflowers had begun to bloom scarlet.

  “It was painted not long ago,” Stone said.

  “That must mean profits are good.”

  “Profits are good.”

  “People seek after a great many explanations, I imagine. For you to keep in business.”

  “Some do, yes.”

  “But not all?”

  “No. Not all.”

  “Funny, isn’t it, how people do differ in their intellectual curiosity. It doesn’t even seem to correlate directly t
o intelligence, does it? With students, of course, you see all levels of curiosity coupled with all levels of intelligence, no predictability—why, I was saying just the other day to Morton, he’s in Anthro, he—”

  “Mr. Harkavy,” Stone said, not urgently, “ask the next question.”

  The two men stared at each other, one serene and waxing, one with nonchalance gone dry. Harkavy could have sworn he caught a whiff of incense—just a passing scent, elusive on warm air.

  “A causal,” Harkavy said. “Why do I keep coming back to Explanations, Inc.?”

  “Come into the back room,” Stone said.

  There was a computer, as of course there would have to be. There was a couch, hard and severe, upon which Harkavy lay. Most of all, there was a parade of people in white lab coats; the parade went on for three days. Harkavy never left, except to make one phone call to the university, requesting emergency sick leave. Psychiatrist, hypnotist, doctor with a compassionate smile and a wicked hypodermic, Stone with spartan meals, a stenographer who was also a notary public. Documentation, Harkavy thought around the wooziness of the hypodermic; it was his one clear thought in three days. He didn’t mind, somehow. Answers awaited at the end. Cleansed and gentled, almost luxuriating in the abandonment of control (the hypodermic?), Harkavy talked, and dozed, and talked some more, and it seemed to him that his words were hard silvery flakes drifting up from his defenseless prone position, and that the flakes coalesced to form a shining mirror in which he saw himself at peace.

  The fee was enormous.

  When at last he stood again in the front of the shop and held in his hand the corporation’s contract, answer, and documentation, Harkavy felt detached enough to read them. The print was small yet easy to read, a rational choice. The smell of passion flowers was much stronger.

  QUESTION: Why has Philip Warren Harkavy returned on thirty-nine separate occasions [Harkavy had not been counting] to the Frazier Street branch of Explanations, Inc.? ABSTRACT: Philip Warren Harkavy exhibits the behavior and thought processes characteristic of metaphobia, a fear of there not being enough meaning in the universe. In this specific case, the basic phobia manifests itself as a counterphobia taking the form of resistance to the idea that the world can be rationally explained at all. This is not an unusual manifestation, here distinguished only by its deep-seatedness and by the subject’s conscious awareness of it. In previous ages, metaphobia gave rise to elaborate and rigid religious structures. In modem periods, other manifestations of the phobia are more common.

  Both the subject’s career as an English professor, transmitting knowledge but not creating it, and his basic personality structure, tenacious self-righteousness undercut by irony, are examples of the basic phobia working itself out in life choices. The subject passionately desires the world to be explicable. He is afraid that it is not. Caught between desire and fear, he is drawn to Explanations, Inc., at the same time that he is repelled by it. This is why he has returned on thirty-nine separate occasions.

  Documentation attached.

  6154A38L

  “What are the numbers at the end for?” Harkavy asked. He looked up from the page. At some point Stone had grown a beard, a lush patriarchal tangle of black curls that deepened his eyes.

  “The numbers are for office use only, Mr. Harkavy.”

  “I see,” Harkavy said. His voice was all tired courtesy, no bluster—the last of the bluster had leached out of him during the three days of research and had not returned. He looked thinner, a tall, quiet man swaying in the incense-laden breeze. “Thank you,” he said quietly, and turned to leave.

  “You can’t go now!” Stone cried. Emotion, the first Harkavy had heard from him with any vigor to it, swelled his voice to richness.

  “No?” Harkavy said.

  “There is one more question!”

  “I can’t think what it could be.”

  “Think is what you can do, Harkavy!”

  “It does not appear to make much difference.”

  “You are merely confused by your first reaction to your answer—this phase will not last. Truly!”

  “Metaphobia,” Harkavy mused.

  “Many live a full and normal lifespan, with proper precautions. With proper precautions. Think, Harkavy—think . . .

  “Thank you,” Harkavy said absently, lost in thought, and left the shop. His feet stumbled a little. The window was crowded with passion flowers, all bursting into bloom, a riot of scarlet flowers rustling mysteriously in perfumed shadows.

  One day. Two days. A week: seven days. On the seventh day, Harkavy returned. He looked as if he had slept badly, and his suit, old and wrinkled, hung from his frame. There was in his face the quiet grayness that is in itself a kind of focus: a great granite boulder whose energies exist perfectly balanced upon one smaller stone beneath, and hence exist motionless.

  “Philip!” Stone cried. He bustled forward, arms thrown wide in welcome, rich, dark beard glistening against the folds of his cape. “You did return!”

  “Stone,” Harkavy said quietly. Stone threw his arms around Harkavy and kissed each cheek, and on his skin Harkavy smelled incense and rich oils. Around them the shop glowed like a jewel box, its air heavy with the passionflowers, lush with velvety promise.

  “One question, Stone,” Harkavy said, without inflection. “One final question.”

  “Of course!” Stone boomed. His black eyes gleamed. “Don’t we need a contract?”

  “Not this time—are you not an old and valued customer? Not this time!”

  The scented air stirred on soft winds.

  Slowly Harkavy said, “I understand the explanation of metaphobia. It is accurate. The longing for order . . . for comprehension . . . it gnaws away at you, gnaws and gnaws . . .”

  “The question, Philip! The question!”

  “Explain . . . I would like to have explained—”

  “Yes? Yes?”

  “Explain the reason for the existence of Explanations, Inc. Why did it come to Frazier Street?”

  “Ah!” crowed Stone, and flung his arms wide in a huge, sensuous blessing. “You have it! You have it!” And at just that moment the walls sprung into intricate and subtle designs in the glowing ancient dyes, and the temple bells began to ring, and ring, and ring.

  “So what is this dump?” the young man sneered. “Another tourist trap?” He began to read the sign posted behind the counter. “Or just local tealeaf garbage? What have you got back there, a crystal ball to bilk the yokels with?”

  “Certainly not,” Harkavy said quietly. He moved his hand behind the counter, and a contract rose up from the slot.

  TEN THOUSAND PICTURES, ONE WORD

  RIZZO’S ILLUSTRATIONS WERE MASTERPIECES. IF ONLY THEY WOULD STAY THE WAY HE PAINTED THEM!

  At two-thirty on a Thursday morning, just before the light bulb in his studio (which was also his kitchen) gave a despairing little pop and burned out, Kenny Rizzo finished his painting. He circled it critically, his head tipped to one side. His paint-spattered canvas shoes, the newest layers gold and black, squeaked on the cracked linoleum.

  From the bedroom his wife Joanne called sleepily, “What was that noise, Kenny? Kenny?”

  “Just the light bulb. Go to sleep, Hon.” By the dim rectangle of light shining from the hall he groped his way to a cupboard, looking for a candle and matches.

  “The light bulb? What did it do?”

  “No, not yet,” Kenny said, hearing her voice as only a texture of sounds, mostly flat. “Almost done. Go to sleep.”

  “I’ll get a new bulb tomorrow, then, when I shop.”

  “Right after I clean up. Good night.”

  By candlelight the painting looked even better. The magazine people should be incredibly pleased. Incredibly! And why not? It was a beautiful job, and it fit the story exactly. Kenny was always careful to read the story he was illustrating; he prided himself on being one of those who got the hair color right, the eyes the same shade that the author casually mentioned on page thre
e. It was part of doing the job right. And this one was right, was beautiful, was a fantasy nude of surpassing life and complexity. The editor of the men’s magazine was going to love it. Every long line of the nude’s goldenskinned body was caressed by a magical light: the curve of hip and weight of breast and smooth, taut arms stretched up to the tiny red dragon hovering in the air above her. Long black hair, confined at the crown by a diamond circlet, cascaded in deep waves clear to the girl’s long, slim legs. On the ground lay a jewel-topped cut-glass bottle which Kenny had copied from a fifteenth-century drawing. The story, a witty fantasy concerning Lucrezia Borgia, a misplaced bottle of poison, and a lustful dragon, was called “Alchemy Con Brio.” Kenny had carefully left a small space for the title and another, larger space for the author’s very famous name. This particular author, he knew, complained regularly and bitterly if his very famous name were not prominent, and Kenny wanted no flak about this picture. He was too much in love with it.

  With a satisfied sigh he began cleaning his brushes by candlelight.

  “Would you like some more coffee?” Joanne said at breakfast. “By the way, Kenny, that last picture of yours is a little . . . odd, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, please,” Kenny said from behind the newspaper. “Just a half a cup.”

  “Just not at all in your . . . your regular stream.”

  “And sugar,” Kenny said. “No, don’t wash up, I’ll do that. You’ll be late for the office.” The Rizzos were scrupulous about dividing up the housework, since both held jobs. Kenny always did his share; was, in fact, glad to do his share. Fair was fair.

  “I did wash up, for all practical purposes,” Joanne said. “There’s only your cup left. Honestly, Kenny—you sat right there and watched me do it. Well, I’m off.” She kissed the top of Kenny’s head and dashed for the subway. Kenny finished his coffee and newspaper. Then he strolled into the living room, where Joanne had moved the easel when she made breakfast, to inspect his painting.