Fictions

by Nancy Kress

  Sam had taken down the crucifix when he took down the ancient dingy needlepoint worked by one of Philippa’s great-aunts and the framed painting of a woodland brook that Philippa had bought at The Art Shoppe in Carter Falls. She wondered if she would have been able to see the crucifix this time. The pink thread of light shot out from one of the crying women, Philippa couldn’t see which one, and touched the first joint of her right thumb.

  At the base of the thumb, just below the knuckle, was a bum blister where she had foolishly touched the pan taking an apple pie for Sam out of the oven. Sam, eating the pie at her kitchen table. Holding the square of heated metal of the wallpaper stripper against this room, while she followed him with the scrub bucket. Holding the tips of her fingers while they watched TV and never saying anything against them, anything at all about stupidity or pride or need.

  At least 257 people. “You could hear people screaming.”

  The knife appeared on the bed. The glowing women cried and wailed. All the sorrow of the world seemed to flow through them, the world beyond this room, that Philippa had once thought to renounce and go be a middle-aged nun because there was nothing left here anyway.

  Philippa whispered, “No,” and the knife vanished.

  She stood shivering in a sudden breeze from the window as the silently keening women also vanished, leaving only the pool of rosy tears on the scarred floor that she and Sam planned to wax shining and hard and golden.

  IN A WORLD LIKE THIS

  John and Emily’s communication problem might herald the end of life as we know it.

  My wife makes out her shopping list not in single words, but in dependent clauses and prepositional phrases. She will write “fruit but not apples; which we have,” or “kuchen, for sunday a.m.” This habit sparks in me a deep, primal dislike—for its manneredness, its pretentious completeness.

  Emily knows this.

  “You realize you’re being ridiculous,” she says.

  “I know it,” I answer, having already been put at a disadvantage by the pettiness of my objections, and now at a further one by admitting them. “I can’t help it.”

  “Of course you can.”

  “I’ll tell you what,” I say, trying to salvage dignity through jocularity—always a risky move. “So long as you don’t end the clauses with a period.”

  Emily smiles at me, the slant-eyed smile that she often wears in bed. “Fair enough. No periods.”

  The next time I come across her shopping list, it says “tampons, for my . . .”

  She has left it on the kitchen table, where I am sure to see it.

  “Look at this, John,” Kip Lowry says after we settle ourselves on the 7:42. He has opened his newspaper, and it is flapping over into my half of the seat. Kip works for some scientific/political think tank downtown and reads the morning newspaper with an intensity that would make me wonder exactly what he expects to see there, except that I suspect it of being a pose to look more knowledgeable than he is.

  “Two earthquakes last night. Mexico City and Miskolc. And both registered exactly the same on the Richter scale.”

  “I didn’t think the Reds released that information.” I poke at the edge of the newspaper, nudging it back toward Kip. He frowns and glances at me evasively. Watching Soviet information may or may not be something his institute does.

  “Who knows? Look at this—another burglary in Hickory Village.”

  Hickory Village is the subdivision in which we both live. I crane my neck toward the paper I have just pushed away.

  “The cops don’t have any leads,” Kip reports. “When do they ever? Hey, look at this—some guy in Albany just won the New York State Lottery for the second time! Do you know what the odds are against that?”

  “High,” I say, apparently too sourly. Kip gives me that evasive glance once more. He does this at parties as well—starts a subject that touches on his specialty, something called information theory, and then suddenly shies away as if his listeners were moving toward something politically sensitive. I dislike the habit intensely. He also wears wide-brimmed, overly dramatic hats.

  “A Russian last name tor that lottery winner,” Kip says slowly. I close my eyes and pretend to sleep. Whatever Kip thinks he is looking for, or wants me to think he is looking for, he can look alone.

  The lobby of Jefferson Tower rings with jackhammers. I step over chunks of floor and rolls of sodden carpet to scream at the receptionist, “What happened?”

  She screams back, “Water leaking from someplace. They can’t find where. Damnedest thing—ruined the carpet!”

  I can’t consider the carpet, which has always looked like cold oatmeal with pebbles in it, to be much loss. The noise, on the other hand, is unbearable. Even in my office on the eighth floor the jackhammers are audible, like a steady whine from huge but distant insects.

  Helen, my secretary, comes in with a sheaf of papers. She looks distracted.

  “This is the agenda for Ken Robinson’s meeting at ten, because he wants to be sure everyone sticks to both the topic and the time frame. This is the script for the new training film, because the production studio is booked for next Tuesday and they need copy approval. Your report for the senior staff isn’t done yet because the Xerox copier is down again.”

  “Christ.”

  “I think the copier is down because either the Corotron needs rewiring or the baffle spring is pulled off the shaft.”

  I stare at her. Helen has trouble getting the top off a jar of coffee. “How do you know that?”

  “I looked inside. I also leafed through the manual because I thought maybe I could fix it.”

  “But you can’t. Nobody can fix those things, not even the tech rep, or they would stay fixed longer than ten minutes after he leaves.”

  “The machines don’t stay fixed because we run too much volume on them. That’s because—”

  “Helen,” I say, with some irritation, “you aren’t by any chance related to my wife, are you?”

  She looks contused. “I don’t think so.”

  “Good.”

  On the 6:17, Kip Lowry smacks his knee with his folded newspaper—the evening edition this time. He has pulled his hat brim down lower than usual, and this strikes me as an ominous sign. Visible is his lower jaw, bristling with a day’s worth of dark stubble, which gives him a dangerous look. The hints Kip drops about his project in information theory seem to mostly involve such tame and academic things as mathematical formulas and high-speed computers, but it has nonetheless always seemed to me that there is something inflamed about the look of Kip’s jaw. Something needing only the right environment to erupt into possibly contagious boils. The 6:17 seems an unlikely environment, but I don’t like that smacking newspaper.

  “Colder tonight,” I say. I am trying to make up for my morning rudeness.

  Kip doesn’t answer.

  “Thought I’d cover the roses, even though it’s early in the year for that. No pattern to the weather lately. You should cover yours, too.” Kip’s roses are the most neglected in Hickory Village: spindly stems and sparse blossoms. This gives me an obscure sense of cheerfulness.

  Kip says, “Sandra is leaving me.” Smack, smack.

  After a pause I say, “I’m sorry.” I know this is inadequate, but what else would be better? We don’t look at each other.

  “After seventeen years,” he says. A tear appears from beneath the lowered hat brim, and I am disgusted with myself for feeling a profound distaste. Kip is, I suppose, the closest thing I have to a friend. Butonthe6:17?

  “You’d think,” he says, “that after seventeen years she’d be willing to ride this thing out.”

  “What thing?” I say, because I see I’m supposed to and despite a strong reluctance to ask.

  “Lara Kashinsky.”

  “Lara Kashinsky?”

  He stiffens. “Lara just happens to be one of the best random-information specialists in the world.”

  “I remember your saying that she’s brilliant
,” I say hastily. I also remember her picture in the newspapers, at the time of her defection. She must be well over fifty.

  “I never thought Sandy would find out,” Kip says gloomily. “And now she won’t even listen. I didn’t plan the thing with Lara. It just happened.”

  “Ummm.”

  “These things happen.” Kip says. He stops smacking the newspaper and stares out the train window, at trees flashing past too fast to be counted.

  “Janice called.” Emily says over a late-night brandy. She tucks her hair behind her ears; this is a characteristic gesture of agitation. “There was another burglary, two doors down from her. The police questioned her and Jim and the kids. No clues. They looked in all the soft mud in the yard for tracks, because—”

  “I can guess why they looked for tracks without your telling me,” I cut in. There is a silence while Emily stares into her brandy. We are sitting up in bed, and the bedside lamp casts a pearly glow on Emily’s shoulders, bisected by the lacy straps of her nightgown. At thirty-eight she is beautiful still, and my irritation vanishes and is replaced by affection. Emily is very precious to me, although it is hard for me to say so. I have always found it hard. Emily knows this; she is one of the few women who will forgive it. I reach for her.

  She frowns. “Why now?”

  “Just because.”

  “Because why?”

  Irritation returns, swamping affection. “Do I need a reason? I want to make love to you. If you don’t want to, say so.”

  “Sandy Lowry is leaving Kip.”

  So that is what the agitation is about, not the burglary. I see that the Hickory Village phones have been buzzing all day. I see, too, the trickiness of the conversation ahead. When one husband strays, all husbands are somehow implicated, in some weird web I have never understood but learned to recognize.

  “Ummm,” I say, noncommittally.

  “It’s because he’s having an affair with that Russian scientist.”

  Emily is watching me closely; another “ummm” will probably not do. I decide instead on honesty.

  “I know. Kip told me today on the train.”

  She stops fiddling with her hair, and her shoulders relax; apparently she knew I knew. “It’s that ridiculous house. It’s strapped him with debt, and he was looking for some sort of cheap release. Sandy didn’t even want such a huge place. Kip only wanted it because he grew up so poor, because his father died when he was three and his mother’s eyesight was too poor for her to work, and her father was an immigrant who never understood about childhood corrective surgery before it was too late.”

  “I don’t think you have to go back three generations and produce such an elaborate explanation. Anyway, you probably couldn’t pin down any definitive reasons. These things happen.”

  Emily shifts against the headboard and reaches out to set her glass on the night-stand. One shoulder strap slides down. Her eyes narrow. “What do you mean—‘these things happen’ ?”

  “They just do. Kip and Lara work together on that information project, whatever it is.”

  “So?”

  “So it just . . . happens.” Even to me these words have started to sound curiously lame, and I resent it.

  Emily punches up her pillow and lies back. “That’s irresponsible. It lets everybody off the hook—it lets Kip off the hook. Things don’t just happen. They’re connected, they happen for good and sufficient reasons!”

  “Emily—”

  “There are always reasons.”

  I suddenly think of my secretary, Helen. “Women always want things so definite. Black and white. The world simply isn’t that way. Things fall into shades of gray, into unpredictable subtleties. Why can’t you just accept that!”

  “I hear, to my own surprise, that I am shouting. Emily turns her head on the pillow to look at me. Perhaps it is a trick of the lighting, some passing effect, but her eyes look like those of a woman I don’t know. They are both thoughtful and outraged; violation sparkles in them like stained glass.

  There is a long silence; which slowly turns unbearable. To break the silence without having to break it, I reach again for Emily. She doesn’t resist, but she lies passive in my arms while I stroke her. Then she half-turns and clutches me almost desperately, and we make very definite and unsubtle love.

  The carpet in the corridor outside my office is sopping. Inside the office, water meanders down the walls, drips from the-ceiling onto my desk, pools on chairs and file cabinets. As I stand in the doorway staring at this, Helen hurries around the corner, looking harried.

  “Oh, Mr. Catton—it’s the sprinkler system, they think. That’s what was wrong in the lobby yesterday, too. They think that while they were jackhammering the floor someone hit something vital and jammed the whole thing.”

  “How long—?”

  “They won’t say!” Helen cries. I have never seen her so overwrought; she is usually the calmest and most efficient secretary on the floor, making consistent sense out of my chaotic meeting and memo flow. “They think it happened because of a workman who is very inexperienced, he had only been on the job two weeks and three days. His supervisor was out sick because he caught the flu from his little boy, who got it at day-care because the supervisor’s wile died in a car crash two years ago and he’s raising the little boy alone.”

  I stare at her. “Helen—how do you know all that?”

  She makes a vague gesture, flinging her palms upward as if begging for mercy. “The control thing tor the sprinkler system was manufactured in Japan, because it cost sixteen dollars and forty-two cents less per unit to do it there. The engineer said it appeared to be functioning perfectly, because he took it out and tested it, but he won’t say how long it will be before you can use your office!”

  “Well,” I say helplessly—could Helen be having some sort of secretarial burnout?—“we can work around the mess, I suppose. Where did you put my phone and the Hentschel files?”

  “In George Schwartz’s office. The water isn’t loo bad in there, and George is out because he took a vacation day to go up to his daughter’s college, because she’s failing two subjects, due to excessive partying with Kappa Delta Omicron. But I don’t know why there’s less water in his office than in yours!”

  “Well,” I say, more helplessly than before, “I don’t suppose it matters. So long as we can get on with the day. So it goes.”

  And at my last words Helen calms down instantly, moving rapidly past calm to a set and rigid face, from which she stares at me in silence like stone.

  “Look at that!” Kip says, his face pressed to the train window. I obediently look; Kip has had a hysterical edge to him for a week, ever since Sandra moved out with their girls.

  “John—did you see it?”

  “Did I see what?”

  “On that other track. A train went by and it . . . shimmered. Like a ghost image on TV.”

  “There are three sets of track there.”

  “No—it wasn’t on the third set! You didn’t see it?”

  “I wasn’t looking.”

  Kip grimaces abstractedly beneath his hat brim. When the brim dips forward, I brace myself. Kip has been twirling his self-aggrandizing veils of information theory all week: message channels. Noise level. Algorithms. Context-sensitive redundancy. If he does it yet again, I will change my seat. This time, I will. But he says something else.

  “Lara called Sandy and told her that I said I wanted to marry her. Marry Lara.”

  I am somehow not surprised by this. “Do you want to marry her?”

  “Of course not. I still care everything for Sandy.”

  “Did you say anything to Lara that might lead her to think—?”

  “Oh, hell, how should I know? You know how it is. You’re in bed, you say things—and then women try to hold you to them in a goddamned court of law. Sandy had a fit. She called me after Lara called her, and then Lara called on the line in the den, and it seemed I was on the phone with one or the other of them all night. Chris
t, the hysteria all around.”

  I can picture it and am meanly glad that Kip lives at the other, richer end of Hickory Village.

  At the station, he trudges toward the Depot, a bar-cum-restaurant built in an antiquated baggage office for commuters grabbing a quick orange juice in the morning, or a quick drink instead of going home. He has been heading for the Depot every night; I don’t know what time he leaves it. I turn my steps in the other direction, toward my street. I am halfway down it when two police cars dash up to the Lindstrom house.

  They swerve to the edge of the lawn, black-and-white doors fly open, and two cops run to the back of the house, and two more to the front. The Lindstroms, I remember vaguely, are on vacation. I prepare to tell this to the cop approaching me when Kitty Sue Cunningham comes running out of her house across the street and begins babbling in the Georgia accent that somehow becomes thicker each year in New Jersey.

  “Ah saw him go in, just sneak around the side of the house, and Ah called the police right away. Ah just know he’s the one who’s been doin’ all these horrible robberies . . .”

  She goes on and on, an anxious, syrupy flow, her eyes never leaving the Lindstrom house, hands twisting the material of a pink dress too young for her lacquered blond beehive. The cop listens stoically.

  “. . . lookin’ so long at the window because Ah was cleanin’ the glass, because of those horrible fly spots every time the weather goes and warms up again and the eggs hatch, and that’s all just because a single housefly can lay one hundred fifty eggs at a time, all hatching in just twelve hours—”

  “What?” I say. There is lead in my lungs.

  “—because the rate they get eaten up by birds and toads and ail those bitty creatures is so high—”