Fictions

by Nancy Kress

  Charlie kept on grinning. “But this was only normal, you know. Not a sign. Only normal.”

  The girl got back into the car and released the hand brake. Charlie wanted to yell “Thank you,” knew he had already said more than enough, knew that the girl had smelled whiskey on his breath, knew she had misunderstood utterly. It didn’t matter. He settled for waving after the moving Buick.

  “Guy is fucking crazy,” the girl muttered, and laid rubber the length of Canal Street.

  In the morning, sober, he thought that he had probably behaved like a fool. He was probably thinking like a fool. Brushing his teeth, knotting his tie, he told himself his thinking was bizarre: he was having temporal- lobe electrical spasms, was having a mid-life crisis, was having stress manifestations, was having all the pop-psych clichés he could drag up from airport paperback racks and Phil Donahue. None of it touched him. The feeling of exultation from the night before, of freedom and strangeness in the world, would not leave him. He smiled at people in the lobby at work; he tore into the script of the employee training film for Fullman Foods; he answered eight phone messages and evaded no calls. “Someone’s in a good mood,” the secretary said.

  Charlie laughed. “Do you believe in chance, Carol?”

  “Of course. I buy a lottery ticket every Tuesday.”

  Charlie laughed again. A lottery ticket! He leaned close to Carol’s face, thick with powder and eyeshadow, and said, “I’ll tell you a secret. God does play dice with the world.”

  “What?”

  “God does play dice with the world. The rules aren’t locked in. Everyday reality is only one side of it. Anything could happen, anything at all.” Carol frowned. “You mean, like, I could end up rich?”

  “You could end up the queen of Sumeria! All you have to do is see it! There is something making its own decisions out there after all, something as real as this fucking desk!”

  Her mouth pursed. “I don’t really appreciate that sort of language, Mr. Foster.”

  “Oh, Carol,” he said gently. She watched him, frowning, all the way into his office. When he came out two hours later, after having accomplished more work than in any two hours of his life, she watched him again. He walked into the elevator with his boss and the art director. As soon as the elevator door closed, there was a grinding screech. The elevator plummeted six floors to the basement. Both the art director and Charlie’s boss were killed. Charlie staggered out of the elevator without a scratch.

  Three elevator company engineers said his survival was a million-to- one interaction of vectors. Two insurance company doctors said it was an unprecedented medical precedent. Charlie sat in the hospital emergency room after he had been checked over by the incredulous staff, waiting for the dead men’s wives and parents to arrive to claim the bodies, and stared at the wall without blinking once.

  Patti was patient. She sat close to him on a gurney against one wall of the emergency room, held his hand, and rubbed her thumb in slow circles on his palm. “Listen, Charlie, it happens. They died, darling, and you didn’t. We all feel guilty when that happens, there’s even a name for it: ‘survivors’ guilt.’ Please don’t do this to yourself. . .”

  “You don’t understand,” Charlie said. “It’s all right. I don’t feel guilty.”

  “No?”

  “No. I feel ready.”

  Patti stopped moving her thumb. “Ready for what?”

  “I don’t know yet.”

  “Charlie . . .”

  “It wouldn’t be for nothing. Not after all this trouble. The broccoli, the brick, the elevator . . . not for nothing.”

  “Charlie—”

  “I can wait. Now that there’s something to wait for. Rolling dice don’t have rules, but they have outcomes.”

  Patti caught her breath. She peered at Charlie, but he caught her at it and smiled, a smile so lucid and tender she was confused all over again. The wife of the dead art director, stumbled into the emergency room, her eyes enormous and her face streaked with tears. Charlie walked over to meet her, gait steady and arms outstretched, while Patti sat biting her lip at the edge of the cot from which her husband had just arisen.

  In the next few months, Charlie became the mainstay of the agency, and the wonder of the city’s advertising grapevine. He took on his boss’s work and his own, handling both so efficiently that in October he was made a partner. Every Sunday he and Patti took the widow of the art director and her two small children on an outing: for a walk in a park, to the beach, to a children’s matinee of Aladdin and the Magic Lamp. The genie rose up to grant Aladdin three wishes, and the youngest child burst into terrified tears. Charlie consoled him with a Mars bar he had thought to bring in his vest pocket, and Patti looked admiring at his prescience.

  People began to comment on Charlie’s steadiness, his gentleness, how well he had come through the accident. He took up squash, lost fifteen pounds, and began beating men ten years younger on the court. He was a gracious winner, a better loser.

  In November he and Patti celebrated their wedding anniversary in Palermo, where she was giving a paper on muon trajectories. Charlie attended her presentation and was grave and interested. At the reception afterward her colleagues found themselves impressed with her husband, despite his occupation. He avoided so effortlessly all the embarrassments of superfluous spouses at learned gatherings: he neither competed, nor sulked, nor faded into corners. While Patti accepted her congratulations—it was an important paper—he held her hand and smiled. Afterwards, he discussed the road system in Sicily with neither condescension nor nervous humor.

  “He is a nice man, your husband,” Patti was told by a French scientist with whom she had once contemplated an affair, “but he looks always as if he is waiting for something, n’est-ce pas? Do you know what it is?” Patti froze. But she watched Charlie, and he seemed to her happier than ever before, and since she was happy, too, she forgot about it. When the conference ended, they went to Paris. They visited Saint-Chapelle, gorged themselves at patisseries, bought secondhand prints along the Seine, and made love every night.

  In March Patti discovered she was pregnant. She and Charlie held long conversations about commitment and career choices and biological clocks, and decided to have the baby. “You’ll make a good father,” she told Charlie. “You really will.”

  The baby was due in December. Patti and Charlie bought a house in a suburb with a good school system, closed in September, and moved. All October, when even the downtown streets swirled with gold and yellow leaves, Charlie worked on the house. He pruned arbor vitae, sealed the driveway, cleaned the gutters. He grew quieter, but not enough for Patti, absorbed in both pregnancy and pions, to notice.

  She was driving home from her lab when one of the sudden electrical storms common to upstate October hit hard. Leaves blew in great rainy gusts against the windshield and were dragged across it by the wipers. Thunder crashed, at first a full minute behind the lightning, but the lag shortened rapidly and then the storm was directly overhead, cacophony and strobe. Saplings seemed bent nearly double by the sheer pressure of sound. Patti drove slowly, turning into her driveway with relief. Jagged cloud-to-ground lightning exploded to her right. She decided to stay in the car until the center of the storm passed.

  Through the water streaming across the windshield she saw Charlie open the side door of the house. He walked bent forward against the wind, with the slow portentousness of a man moving underwater. He wore jeans, a red sweatshirt, and canvas loafers. It seemed to take a long time for him to cross the yard, heading toward the only large tree on the Fosters’ new property, a forty-foot sycamore whose branches flailed around the trunk like knotted scourges.

  Patti put her hand on the inside door handle. Charlie tipped his head back so far it seemed he must lose his balance and slowly put his hand on the trunk of the tree. Lightning flared, followed a nearly imperceptible moment later by thunder, as if the storm had moved on. Charlie lowered his head, and even through the rain Patti could see
his eyes, brimming with light. Then a second bolt of lightning seared the sky, the trunk of the sycamore sliced down the center to within fifteen feet of the ground, and Charlie tore through air already rent by deafening sound.

  Charlie lay bandaged on his hospital bed. Gauze filmed him like veils. Every time she looked at him, Patti shook with a fury the depth of which scared her so much that her words came out in reasonable calm, as if this were a discussion about library books, about broccoli, about survivor guilt from an elevator crash. Charlie answered with the same tone. To a passing nurse, they might have been discussing tax reform.

  “Why, Charlie?”

  “I can’t explain. I’m sorry.”

  “You’re sorry? For God’s sake, Charlie . . . try.”

  He said nothing. Huge dark splotches ringed his eyes, as if he had been in a fistfight. It occurred to Patti that had she passed him on the street like this, she might not have recognized him.

  “Charlie . . . I’m scared. The doctor says you’re lucky to be alive. At all. I need to understand. Charlie?”

  “I thought . . . I wouldn’t even care about the pain, the burns, if only . . .”

  “If only what?”

  “Lightning hits trees like that all the time. Just like that. In that same way. Seventy-five thousand forest fires a year start with lightning.” Patti took a deep breath. She laid both hands across her burgeoning stomach, but her voice kept its relentless calm. “Charlie, we’ve been happy, the last year or so, haven’t we? Haven’t we been happy?”

  “Happier than I’ve ever been in my life.”

  “And was it because . . . was it all because of that? Because you thought the laws of probability were suspended around you? Because you survived a freak choking and a freak projectile and a freak fall? Because you believed that until now there was some sort of stupid supernatural crap shoot going on and you were the favored player?”

  Charlie watched her from his bruised eyes.

  “No,” Patti went on slowly, “not because you were winning. That’s not what turned you on. It was just because you were in the game. Just because you thought there was a game. You wouldn’t have minded getting maimed by that lightning if it had only left hieroglyphics burned into the sycamore. If it had only spoken to you from a goddamn burning bush. You’d risk . . . you’d have Lem and Ed die in an elevator as long as there was some sign that there was . . . you’d actually rather . . .”

  “No,” Charlie said. But his voice was very soft.

  Patti looked at him, stood up, and smoothed her maternity jumper free of wrinkles: a fussy gesture, totally unlike her. Never had she looked less like a scientist; never had Charlie been more afraid of her. She groped for her purse where it hung over the back of the stiff hospital chair, fumbled the strap onto her shoulder, and walked out.

  Charlie turned his face toward the blank wall.

  Three nights later, the burn floor of the east wing of the hospital caught fire. Alarms screamed; the sprinkler system turned on. Charlie awoke to find gentle rain falling on his face. He lay quietly, listening to the running footsteps and shouting voices up and down the corridor beyond his door. The smell of smoke, acrid and tantalizing as a volcano, drifted toward him. He crawled painfully out of bed.

  The other two beds in the room were empty; it was a slow week for burns. Charlie groped toward the door, stopping to lean heavily on a utilitarian dresser painted the hideous pink of flayed skin. The fire seemed to be at the far end of the corridor, from which smoke roiled in lazy coils. The temperature rose several degrees within the few steps from his room into the hall.

  A stout nurse, jaw clenched in fright, said quietly between her teeth, “Come on, Mr. Foster. This way out. Come on, now.” She fastened a hand on Charlie’s elbow, just below the loose sleeve of his hospital gown.

  Charlie shook off the hand and lurched away from her, toward the elevator. She said sharply, “Elevators are inactive during fires, Mr. Foster, you have to—” The rest drowned in more alarms. The lights went out.

  The red EXIT sign still glowed. Charlie stumbled toward the stairs. An orderly carrying an elderly woman so wrapped in bandages that only her bony ancient arm hung free reached the door first and opened it with his foot.

  Charlie pushed past them, ignoring the orderly’s “Hey!” In the stairwell the lights had not gone out. He lurched down two flights of stairs, followed first by the orderly, then by the stout nurse leading two more bandaged figures, and finally by two men bumping what sounded like a gurney down the metal stairs. Intermittently alarms shrieked, stopped, started again. Between mechanical shrieks Charlie heard the men with the gurney cursing methodically. Each time the door opened above, more smoke drifted into the stairwell.

  At the second floor landing, the fire door burst open and Charlie was engulfed by young women, none of whom looked sick although they all wore hospital gowns. They jostled against his bandaged burns and he cried out, the sound lost in the din. Borne along in the painful crush of luscious bodies, Charlie reached the first floor landing and staggered out into the cool night. Away from the building, he collapsed onto a patch of grass ornamented with marigolds in a ring of rocks like a very clean campfire. Sirens screamed as they whipped around the corner to the other side of the building. Someone bent over him, yelled, “This one’s okay,” and vanished. Charlie wound his hand around a clump of marigolds and held on. He began to tremble.

  When the trembling stopped, he raised his head to look at the hospital. It looked solid and intact, each floor except the east wing third dotted with soft lights from veiled windows. Charlie started to cry.

  “Hey,” said a young voice beside him. “Don’t. It’s all right. A fire guy said they got everybody out in time.” She put a hand on Charlie’s burned arm. He yelled and she jerked back, her pretty uncreased face filled with concern. When she leaned over Charlie, her hair fell in her eyes and her hospital gown slipped off one shoulder. She looked about fifteen. “Everybody . . . out?” Charlie gasped. It hurt to talk.

  “Yeah.”

  “Not me,” Charlie said. The marigolds tore under his hand.

  The girl peered at him. “What d’ya mean?”

  “I didn’t even look. At the fire. I just ran. I didn’t even look.”

  The girl inched away from him across the grass. Charlie grabbed her retreating knee. “Was it a normal fire? Was it?”

  “A what?”

  “A normal fire? Or was there something strange about it, something improbable? Anything at all? Try to remember!”

  The girl stopped inching and removed Charlie’s hand from her knee. Lips pursed, she scanned his bandaged body, wild eyes, clump of strangled marigolds. Charlie saw that, incredibly, she was chewing gum.

  He said eagerly, “Do you always chew gum? Is it that? Do you always chew gum during fires?”

  “Do I always—you’re whacko, man, you know that?”

  Charlie clutched at her. “But do you? Do you?”

  “Put your hand on my knee again and I’ll belt you. An old feeble burned guy like you!”

  Charlie groaned. The sound apparently moved the girl from virtue to pity; she sighed and pulled her flannel gown back up on her shoulder. “Look, I don’t know if I always chew gum in fires or not. I never been in no fires before. I just chew gum since I got pregnant because I stopped smoking, you know? It’s bad for kids.”

  “Pregnant? You’re pregnant?”

  The girl made a face; suddenly she looked much older. A floodlight threw abrupt glare onto the hospital. Someone behind the curve of light shouted orders. Charlie saw that the girl’s eyes were the same fresh blue as her robe, and her hair a soft brown. In the harsh light there was a firm purity to the line of her jaw.

  He choked out, “Did the baby have a. . . bodily father?”

  “Ain’t no other way to do it, is there?”

  “But I need some way to know!”

  “Know what, for chrissake?”

  “Know,” Charlie said, but it came out in a
whisper.

  The girl sighed. “Well, don’t freak over it—it was just a guy named Darryl. I met him in a laundromat. Look, man, you need help. Stay here, I’ll get somebody.”

  She wandered off. Charlie lay still, staring at the hospital. The normal paraphernalia of firefighting came and went: trucks, ladders, streams of water flung into the night.

  “All under control,” said a male voice somewhere in the darkness to his left. “Everybody out. Fire contained. We should all get goddamn medals.”

  Someone else laughed. “Just your nice normal textbook fire.”

  “But is there a game!” Charlie cried.

  The girl wandered back and sat down. “You okay? I can’t find anybody for you, they’re all busy with patients. But nobody’s hurt. Damn, look at that, I broke a nail.” She bent over her hand, then raised blue eyes to Charlie. “It’s a wonder nails last at all. I tell you, it’s a fucking miracle.”

  SPILLAGE

  Nancy Kress’s last story for F&SF, “Out of All Them Bright Stars” (March 1985), was a Nebula award winner; and her new novel AN ALIEN LIGHT, was recently published by Arbor House (reviewed in January 1988). Her new story is an offbeat and surprising variation of a familiar fairy tale.

  WHEN THE COACH broke for the third time, the second coachman was flung sideways over the shrieking axle and down an embankment. He rolled in the moonless darkness, over and over, brambles tearing at the velvet of his livery and whipping across his face. He uttered no sound. There was water at the bottom, a desultory and dirty little stream: the coachman lay in it quietly, blinking in pain at the stars, blood trickling from one temple.

  A rat fell on top of him, squeaked once, and scurried off into the brush.

  From far above, the coachman heard a sudden feminine cry. It was not repeated, but after a while there came to his dazed ears a muffled sound, not quite footsteps, as if someone were dragging along the road above. The lady in the coach, or the First Coachman himself—The sound receded and died, and no other took its place.