Fictions

by Nancy Kress

  “Look at it this way,” Caroline suddenly added in a hard voice he didn’t recognize but knew immediately had carried them over some border, into a new descent in terrain, “now I couldn’t divorce you. We can’t afford it.” She jack-knifed off the sofa and went into the bathroom. Potter sat there, reaching for the drink he had already finished. The phone rang.

  “Congratulations, Mr. and Mrs. William Boylan!” said a professionally cheery voice. “Your entry has just won an all-expense-paid trip to Hawaii.”

  Potter said nothing.

  “Hello? Is this the Boylan residence? Hello?” The voice sounded a little less professional.

  “Yes,” Potter said, “but which Boylan did you want? There are a lot of us, and the listings in the phone book are wrong.”

  “Let me see,” the voice said uncertainly, “Mr. and Mrs. William Boylan at. . . I have it right here someplace, here . . . at 5542 Lapham Park Road.”

  “No, I’m sorry,” Potter said, “this is James Boylan on East Main.”

  “Oh, I am sorry,” the voice said, all professionalism restored. It added roguishly, “Especially for you!”

  “Happens,” Potter said. He hung up and went back to stare at Melissa’s sleeping face.

  There was no 5542 Lapham Park Road. Potter, driving out after work in Caroline’s Chevette, which he knew she needed that evening, followed the street from its origins at a city park out to its last suburban house, 5506. The builders had not yet put up the rest of the development, although there were signs they might: a half-finished road, red X’s on certain trees. The finished houses were big, surrounded by healthy mature trees left standing during the building process, and sparse new lawns. There were in-ground swimming pools, bay windows, twin chimneys, landscaped lots large enough for that urban luxury, privacy. The smells of summer evening hung in the air: cut grass, warm asphalt, overblown roses, the sweet sweat of healthy toddlers. Lawn sprinklers whirled.

  On the way home, Potter stopped at a restaurant with a public phone and directory. There was no listing for William Boylan.

  “I needed the car,” Caroline said stiffly to Potter when he returned. Her green eyes sparkled with resentment. “You knew I needed it tonight.”

  Potter didn’t answer. Anything he said would only make it worse. Sadness welled up from his belly to his throat, choking him.

  “I told you,” Caroline said. Melissa, standing beside her mother, looked at him flatly. When he reached out to smooth her beautiful hair, she flinched.

  Brendan slouched into the living room. It was the first evening he had been home in over a week; more and more he stayed at his friend Kelso’s house, with Kelso’s family. Potter had at first protested this, but Caroline had said wearily, “Oh, let him stay there. Why would he want to stay here?” and Potter had not fought her. He knew he was losing some quality essential for fighting, some fundamental vigor.

  “Phone, Dad.”

  “For me?”

  Brendan’s face twitched in disgust. “No. For Superman.” He slouched out.

  Potter walked on trembling legs to the extension in the bedroom. A girl’s voice said, “Daddy? It’s Jeanine.” He recognized the voice; it had last sung “Happy Birthday” to him, sweet and tuneful. How had Brendan come to pass on the call? Whom had she asked for?

  “Daddy?”

  Potter closed his eyes and heard himself say, “Yes.”

  “Guess what? I won!”

  “You did.”

  “Yes! You sound funny, Daddy. Are you okay?” The young voice radiated concern.

  “I have a cold, Honey.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry. Anyway, I won! I played a wrong note in the first movement, you wouldn’t believe how dumb, but I didn’t let it rattle me and I played the second movement like we rehearsed, and I won! And one judge said I was the youngest to win in the violin division ever!”

  “That’s wonderful.”

  “Yes,” the voice burbled, “and you should have seen Gary and Susie, they were jumping up and down in the first row and clapping like crazy, even Susie. Mom, too. Here she is.”

  “Bill?” said the voice Potter remembered, its huskiness and warmth as full of light as the child’s. Potter could see it, that light: shimmering auroras, silver and pearl, behind his eyelids. He hung up.

  For a long time he stood there, finally whispering, “No,” but so softly no one else could hear.

  “No what?” Melissa said. She had unaccountably appeared at his elbow. He looked at her, at the horrible flatness in her eyes that had drifted there out of some imbalanced chemical weather in her brain, out of Potter’s and Caroline’s misery, out of some unknown country that, Potter realized, he did not really believe Dr. Horacek would ever map.

  “No nothing, baby,” he said, and reached to gather her into his arms. Melissa kicked him and squirmed away, running from the bedroom. At the doorway she turned, her little face full of the anguished and pointless fury which modern medicine said was part of her illness, and spat.

  “Don’t touch me! I wish you weren’t my Daddy!”

  She whirled and was gone. Potter grabbed the phone and yanked the cord from the wall. With all the strength he had left, he hurled it across the room at the mirror over the dresser. Glass shattered and flew wildly in silver splinters of flashing light.

  AT&T Subsidiary Repair Operator Number 21 claimed that the company had already acted on Complaint #483-87A, cross-wired phones in the same digital decad, but would look into the situation yet again. Potter said that the address on file for the other digits did not exist, and possibly the digits did not either, and there would be nothing to look into. Repair Operator Number 21 did not reply.

  Potter took to calling 645-2892 from his office, from the kitchen extension when there was no one else at home or the bedroom extension when there was, once from a pay phone outside Melissa’s therapist’s office. He never called twice at the same time of day; he never spoke. Jeanine or Connie or Bill or Gary would answer, and Potter would listen a moment and hang up. Susie never answered; Potter guessed she was too young, perhaps even a baby. Gary’s voice had the huskiness of his mother’s. Only Bill Boylan ever reacted with suspicion to the silence at the other end of the phone, and Potter imagined his suspicion to smell of protection, not fear. Connie and Jeanine answered liltingly—“Hello?”—Gary with offhand confidence. Often there was laughter in their voices, as if the phone had interrupted some blithe conversation or on-going family joke.

  On a Saturday night in late October, calling at 10:30 p.m. when Caroline had stormed out after a fight and Brendan had not been home for two weeks and Melissa had gone on one of her increasingly frightening rampages and then, exhausted, had fallen asleep, Potter heard two receivers lift simultaneously. Bill’s voice said, “Hello,” the first syllable heartier than the second, and Jeanine said “Hi there!” and then burst into laughter that echoed from what sounded like a dozen feminine young throats. A slumber party.

  “Get off the phone, Honey,” Bill said. “I got it.”

  “Yes, Daddy.”

  “Hello,” Bill repeated to the silent Potter. And then, “Now you listen to me. I don’t know who you are or what you think you’re doing calling my family every few days like this, but you better cut it out now, buddy, or you’ll wish you had. The phone company can put a tracer on this line. I’ve already spoken to them about it. Do this again and you’ll be in deep shit. From both them and me, if I find out who and where you are. Got that?”

  “Yes,” Potter said, not caring if Boylan recognized his voice, if he connected the crossed-wires malfunction with this newer, less mechanical one. But apparently Boylan did not make the connection. In his world, Potter thought, malfunctions were separate, manageable. They did not mutate and cross-breed and turn cancerous, feeding on their own deformed tissues until the center itself could no longer hold.

  “Scum,” Boylan said, and hung up.

  Potter put his own receiver down gently, as if it were alive.

 
He gathered together all the photographs Melissa had decapitated, and put them into a 9 x 12 manila envelope. With them he folded one of Melissa’s therapy reports, a heartbreaking document in prophylactic prose: “Subject systematically destroys toys in playroom environment. One-to-one observation reveals no symbolic preference in plaything destruction.” Potter put into the envelope a notice from the bank stamped INSUFFICIENT FUNDS. He added a torn piece of foil from the packet of birth control pills he had found in Caroline’s drawer and had left there, after a long sightless moment in which he felt the knife he had not minded at his actual vasectomy. He even put in a paint flake from the Buick.

  He addressed the envelope in clear block letters:

  MR AND MRS WILLIAM BOYLAN

  5542 LAPHAM PARK ROAD

  WINTHROP, NEW YORK

  At the Post Office, he looked up the zip code for such of Lapham Park Road as existed. He was careful to include his return address. Five days later, the manila envelope was delivered to Potter’s mailbox, stamped NO SUCH ADDRESS—RETURN TO SENDER.

  So it would have to be the phone.

  He stayed home from work on a Tuesday, when Caroline was at her part-time job and Brendan and Melissa at school. Just before he picked up the receiver, Potter had a moment of clarity, unwelcome as sudden nakedness. Why had he mailed the envelope? What had he hoped? To somehow poison the other, luminous world he could not have, or to send a cry of help for his own? He hated both alternatives, writhed in humiliation just thinking of them. Boylan’s voice saying “Scum. . . .”

  But as he had hoped, it was Connie who answered. That husky voice, vibrant with warmth. “Hello?”

  “My name is Dave Potter. Listen, please don’t hang up on me, Connie. You don’t know me, but our phone lines were crossed a few months ago and I spoke to you and your family. Since then things here have just fallen apart, you can’t know, I don’t know how or why but I’m about at the end of my rope and I need to talk to you for a while. Just talk. I’m harmless to you, I swear it, and your house doesn’t exist anyway so I couldn’t come there to—” Potter stopped, appalled. What was he saying?

  Connie was silent. Potter felt her bewilderment, coming over the phone line in waves. He clutched the receiver tighter.

  “Please don’t hang up. Please. I know how this must sound to you, but there isn’t anything here like your family, your marriage, nothing, do you hear me, we can’t do it anymore—” He realized he was shouting, made himself lower his voice.

  “Connie—”

  “Please leave me alone,” she said, and even through her fear and his grief some part of Potter’s mind still registered that “please,” a grace note grown so alien that it stunned him and he groaned.

  “Connie—”

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered, “I can’t help you,” and hung up.

  Potter remained standing in his bedroom, listening to silence. After a while, it was replaced by a dial tone, and then by a high whining drone like wind in dead trees.

  In January, after the holidays, Caroline asked Potter for a divorce. He didn’t contest it; in New York State, there would have been little point. He and Caroline argued bitterly over financial and custody arrangements, but by Valentine’s Day she was gone.

  Potter moved into a two-bedroom apartment, to which he brought his children every other weekend and Wednesday nights.

  Shortly before his share of the furniture arrived but after his phone had been installed. Potter surrendered to impulse and dialed 645-2892. Standing there in the bare wooden box with its sterile walls and cheap Scotch-guarded carpet, Potter felt his heart begin a slow hammering against his ribs, which kept up even after a voice answered.

  “The number you have reached has been disconnected. The new number for that party is unlisted. Thank you for using AT&T.”

  In June, Melissa was taken off Ritalin by her doctor. Without the medication, her rages increased for a brief time, but then began to subside. It was decided at a tense conference of Potter, Caroline, Dr. Horacek, and the clinic staff that Melissa should repeat kindergarten at a public school. This announcement did not seem to upset her. “Okay,” she said, not looking up from dressing her Cabbage Patch doll.

  On a Friday afternoon the following October, Potter was driving in an unfamiliar part of the city. He had had a business appointment that had taken far longer than it should have. His watch said nearly 6:30, and he still had to pick up the circus tickets before the Ticketron closed and get to the bank before it closed. He needed a hefty wad of cash for tomorrow. Early, before the bank opened, he was driving Brendan upstate to visit two community colleges that were supposed to have strong programs in mechanical arts. The colleges were two hundred and fifty miles apart; they had appointments at the first one at 10:00 a.m. and the second at 4:00 p.m. and would spend Saturday night at a motel somewhere. Sunday afternoon was the circus for Melissa, and Potter hadn’t gotten around to doing any laundry in two weeks. It would be tight, very tight. He drove with one hand drumming on the dashboard, leaning forward over the wheel to arrive at the Ticketron three inches earlier.

  He passed the intersection of Lapham Park Road.

  Potter wrenched the wheel to the right. Before he had time to think about it, he was driving east on Lapham, away from the city park, past the row houses separated by narrow concrete driveways, past the 1950s ranches and split levels, to the old trees and new development where the road ended.

  The builders had done a lot in fifteen months. The last house was now 5573. Beyond it, bulldozers and backhoes stood yellow and silent against the bloody Indian summer sunset, looming over stacks of lumber and bags of cement and spools of cable. Kids climbed on the bulldozer, shrieking at each other in delight. As Potter watched from his parked car, one of them, a small boy, climbed off the heavy equipment and wandered down the street to stare at the moving van in front of 5542.

  The new owner was carrying in furniture himself, along with the uniformed movers. He balanced a hall table, silky amber-colored wood with a matching chair upholstered in rose, against his muscular chest. The chair, upside down on the table, slid a little. A woman ran lightly down the steps, smiling, and steadied the chair. She had sleek chestnut hair, bright blue eyes, and long slim legs in crisp jeans. Behind her a child appeared in the doorway, waddling on bare legs beneath a plastic diaper; an older girl dashed up behind the toddler and grabbed her before she could try to navigate the steps. The older girl grinned and shook her head, her long hair cutting the air. From around the corner of the house, Gary tentatively approached the neighbor boy and smiled shyly.

  Potter started his engine, made a three-point turn, started back up Lapham Park Road. The hall table had had an underslung, open shelf instead of a drawer. He wondered if the table would stand in an upstairs hall or a downstairs one, and if the phone placed on it would be a desk model, a slimline, or some fancy custom job to match whatever the Boy- lans’ idea of home decoration might be.

  Potter pushed his foot down on the gas pedal. The bank closed in half an hour, the Ticketron an hour after that, and if he didn’t get to the bank before it closed, he wouldn’t be able to be on time for his trip with Brendan tomorrow. He stopped thinking about the phone. It had nothing to do with him; it never had.

  1987

  CANNIBALS

  In the powerful story which follows, Nebula award-winning author Nancy Kress deftly shows us that there’s more than one kind of cannibal

  The air was starting to close in on me again when Rachel and I met Ta-Nin on the path between the compound and the river. We had been having a desultory picnic at the water’s edge, sitting on the dank spongy ground and talking through the filthy air, until I couldn’t stand it any more and Rachel led us back. Ta-Nin came crashing along the path in the opposite direction. Her flat bare feet broke foliage and stumbled over rocks the way they all did, raising noise even in this spongy squat forest where noise didn’t seem a possibility.

  “Something’s wrong,” Rachel said. “Look at he
r, Jake.”

  I looked, but without knowing what I was supposed to be seeing. Planet-side just a few months after two years in space, I was in that stage of acculturation where everything irritated: not just the air, which was a thick living soup of airborne spores and nonfungs and plant filaments, but the pulpy ground, the flaccid trees, the aliens themselves, too fat and too short and too unknown and too stupid. Everything.

  Except Rachel Harbatu.

  “Something must have happened,” she said. Dropping to her knees beside Ta-Nin, Rachel talked with her in those rapid hacking coughs they called a language. I tried to figure out how she knew this was Ta-Nin and not another of the compound-tamed Sha. The alien, half my height, gazed at Rachel from dark, nearly circular eyes set in a face that seemed all gray jowl. A strip of hair the color of pale grease ran from the top of her head along her spine and down the backs of both short legs.

  “She won’t tell me what’s wrong.” Rachel frowned; my irritation increased. With the aliens she was always somehow a little different: more obvious, less the ironic and detached scientist I enjoyed taking to bed, more like the Kelvin colonists—that is not true. She was nothing like the colonists. But with the Sha she was different, and I didn’t like it.

  “She won’t tell me,” Rachel repeated. She rose to her feet; nonfungs dirtied her knees. “She just says nothing is wrong.”

  “Maybe nothing is.”

  “No. Look at her. They’re such bad liars.”

  “Then why do they lie all the time?”

  She threw me a cool look. The whole picnic had been like that: jumpy with things unsaid. Neither of us had mentioned her father. Or maybe it was only me that was jumpy. Rachel’s cool look had no hurt in it; she never demanded that I share her interest in the Sha. She never demanded anything. I had known she would answer my question with that remote calm. It was why I had asked it.

  Ta-Nin put her blobby four-fingered hand on Rachel’s hip and pushed in a gesture even I could interpret. She wanted us to move along the path, back towards the river. Rachel shook her head.