Fictions

by Nancy Kress

  “Not yet. That’s the weird thing. On either side of the steps were these two humongous stone things, really strange, and even when the first one spoke to me I wasn’t scared. They were half lion and half some kind of bird.”

  “Griffins,” I said, despite myself. “Fierce predators who guard treasure and eat humans.” Both looked at me blankly. I added—also despite myself—“Paramount once did the movie. You must have seen it, Cherlyn, you pride yourself on your knowledge of your profession’s history. B-movie. Nineteen, uh, thirty-seven. The Griffin That Ate Atlanta.”

  “Oh, yes,” Cherlyn said vaguely. “Wasn’t that Selznick?”

  “Waldman,” I said. Brad shot me a warning look.

  “I remember now,” Cherlyn said. “I remember thinking there was a part in there I would have been great for.”

  “I’m sure,” I said. In her present condition, she could play Atlanta.

  “Anyways,” Cherlyn said, “in my dream this griffin spoke to me. Actually, they both did. The one on the left—no, wait, it was the one on the right—the one on the right said, ‘Soon.’ Right out loud, real as life. Then the one on the left said, ‘We shall return.’ ”

  “Old griffins don’t die, they just fade away,” I said.

  “Huh?”

  Brad frowned at me. I said, “Nothing.”

  “Well, anyways, that did sort of give me the spooks, right? This weird stone griffin looks me right in the eye and says, ‘We shall return.’ No, wait—it was ‘We can return.’ No, no, wait—it was ‘Now we can return.’ That was it.”

  In the midst of the dialogue editing, the phone rang. The quality of mercy, and it wasn’t even raining. I reached backwards from my chair to answer it, but Brad leapt up, knocked over his coffee, and made an end run around the table to get there first. Excilda appeared with a sponge, clucking. Brad listened and handed the receiver to me without meeting my eyes.

  “Expecting a call, are we?” I said. Excilda disappeared, still clucking. Brad’s eyes met Cherlyn’s, then slid sideways to the table in nonchalance as phony as his tie. I felt a brief cold prickling at the back of my neck.

  “Celia?” the phone said. “You there, darling?”

  It was Geraldine Michaelson, nee Gerald Michaelson, my lawyer and oldest friend. She had on her attorney voice, which was preferable to his all-us-girls-together voice, and I prepared to listen to whatever she had to say. But she was merely confirming our monthly lunch date.

  “There’s one or two things we might discuss, Celia.”

  “All right,” I said, watching Brad. His blue eyes did not meet mine. Handsome, handsome man—his father had been gorgeous, the dear dead bastard.

  “Some . . . irregularities,” Gerry said.

  “All right,” I said. There are always irregularities. The biggest irregularity in the world kicked under my daughter-in-law’s negligee.

  “Fine,” Gerry said. “See you then.”

  I passed the phone to Cherlyn, who instead of hanging it up as anyone else would, sat holding it like a party drink. “And then in my dream, the stone griffin sort of shook itself on the steps—”

  “You told someone,” I said to Brad. He turned on his dazzling grin. I was not dazzled; I knew him when. “Cut the bullshit. You broke your word and leaked it. And that phone call was supposed to be the story breaking. Who did you give it to?”

  “—even though it was stone,” Cherlyn said loudly. “And then—”

  “Who, Brad?”

  “Really, Mother, you worry too much. You always have.” More grin: his repertoire is limited. If he were an actor instead of a broker, he’d be as execrable as Cherlyn. He took the phone from her limp hands and hung it up. “You shouldn’t have to worry now, at your time of life. You raised your family and now you should just relax and enjoy life and let us worry about this baby.”

  “Who, Brad?”

  “—the griffin stood right up—are you listening, Mother Celia?—stood right up—”

  “You could have waited. You promised the doctors and researchers. You signed a contract. There would have been plenty of money later, without selling a tawdry scoop.”

  “Now just wait a minute—”

  “—on the stone steps big as life and said again ‘Soon,’ and I liked to died because—”

  “You never did have any style. Never.”

  “Don’t you—”

  Cherlyn half-rose in her chair and shouted, “—like to died because those stone lion-things just shook out this huge set of stone-cold wings!”

  We turned our heads slowly to look at her. Cherlyn’s pretty vapid eyes opened wide enough to float L.A.

  The phone rang.

  Reporters. TV cameras. Cherlyn in a blue maternity smock, blue bows in her hair, no more Camille. Auditioning for the Madonna. Brad in his flashy tie, good suit, coffee-stained cuff, reveling with a sober face. Sleaze and charm. My son.

  Miss Lincoln’s pregnancy has been completely normal. No, we are not apprehensive about the baby’s health. All fetal monitoring shows normal development.

  Got two dice?

  My wife and I regard it as a singular honor to be chosen to bear the first child with this particular genetic adaptation, the first in a breathtaking breakthrough that will let mankind finally realize all its century-long aspirations.

  Got two hundred dice?

  Ten years ago, it was barely possible to genetically select for hair color. Ten years from now, the human race will be poised at the start of a renaissance that will dwarf anything which has gone before. And our little Angela Dawn will be among the first.

  I had not heard the name before. From the window, I could imagine Brad and Cherlyn scanning the crowd of reporters before them on the lawn, looking beyond for the next wave: agents, book publishers, studio people. How much did a story like this go for these days? Yahweh and Technicolor Mary.

  My wife and I talked this over at great length, and agreed it was momentous enough to interrupt her film career for a brief time in order to participate in this, uh, momentous research. We both felt it’s what my father, the late Dr. Richard Felder, would have wanted.

  He wasn’t missing a trick. But Richard, whatever else he was, was not stupid. Physicists seldom are. Richard would not have stood there in the wrong tie speaking over-confident platitudes. Richard could have told Brad something about the unseen risks, the unseen connections, in universes more complex than Universal Pictures.

  This opportunity represents the greatest treasure any parents could give their child. But Miss Lincoln and I do regret that the story has broken prematurely. I have asked Dr. Murray at the Institute to investigate how this could have happened. However, since it has happened, it seems better to answer your questions honestly than to permit possibly irresponsible speculation.

  I didn’t stay to hear any more. While the reporters were still enthralled, I ducked out the back door, struggled over the orchard wall, and called a cab from the Andersons’ housekeeper’s room. Juana eyed my torn skirt with bemusement, shrugged, and went back to polishing silver. She once, in a burst of confidence after seeing Cherlyn’s sole film, told Bruce Anderson that Cherlyn looked like “Alicia in Wonderland, only Alicia, in that book, she keep on her clothes,” a remark which endeared Juana to me for life. The Mad Tea Party. The Queen of Hearts. Off with her head. In Cherlyn’s case, redundancy.

  I suddenly remembered that it was a griffin who conducted Alice to the trial of the Jack of Hearts.

  It must have been that thought which gave me Cherlyn’s dream. Eyes closed in the cab on the way to Gerry’s office, I walked up the shallow marble steps to the temple. The griffins, en regardant, watched me from wild carved eyes, but did not speak. I crept towards the one on the left. The great predatory stone head swung towards me, so that I was forced to step back to avoid the hooked beak. Manes of spiral curls, writhing as if alive, stretched towards me. The lion’s tail swished from side to side. Stone talons gripped tighter on unhewn rock. But the beast remained sile
nt.

  I said, “Are you returning?” Dreams permit one inanity.

  The griffin remained silent. But then the eyes suddenly changed. They turned black, a black deeper than any night, more ancient than the marble underneath my feet. The griffin rose and shook its wings: pointed, deeply-veined, stone flesh over muscled bone.

  But to me it said nothing.

  “Celia!” Gerry cried, coming towards me with both hands extended and both eyes averted. That was bad; Gerry considered eye contact very important. In the days when he was an agent and I was Waldman’s chief scripter, he would make eye contact on the L.A. Freeway at seventy. “What is it,” I said.

  “You’re looking wonderful.”

  “What is it?”

  Gerry rubbed her jaw. Under the make-up, she needed a shave. “Your portfolio.”

  I found that somewhere inside, I’d known. “How bad?”

  “Pretty bad. Come inside.”

  She closed the office door. I sat by the window. Brad had had my portfolio for a little over a year. To get the business started, Mother. Desperate dignity in his unemployed voice. A gesture of maternal faith.

  “He’s been stock churning,” Gerry said. “Turned over the entire damn portfolio twenty times in the last ten months. And chose badly. There’s almost nothing left.”

  “How do you know? I gave him complete power of attorney. He wouldn’t tell you.”

  “No.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Don’t ask. I know.”

  “You never trusted him.” She didn’t answer me. I said, “The real estate?”

  “I don’t know yet. Being looked into now. I only found out about the other this morning.”

  “When will you know?”

  “Possibly tonight. I’ll call you if . . . the portfolio was a lot of money, Celia. What’d he need it for?”

  “Had your TV on this morning?”

  She hadn’t. We both stared out the window. Black dots whirled in the blue distance. They might have been sea gulls. Finally Gerry said, “This much churning is actionable.”

  “He’s my son.”

  She didn’t look at me. I remember Gerry when he was married to Elizabeth. After Geraldine’s operation, Elizabeth took the boys back to Denmark and changed all their names. I was the one who scraped Gerry up off the bathroom floor, called the ambulance, stuck my fingers down his throat to make her vomit however many pills were still in her stomach.

  We sat watching the flying black dots, which at this distance might have been anything at all.

  I took a cab to the Conquistador, stopping on the way at the Book Nook on Sunset. The cabbie was delighted to go all the way up the coast to the Conquistador. He had even heard of it. “You know, industry people used to stay there. Sam Waldman and his people, they used to go there all the time. Take over the whole place for planning a movie or editing or maybe just partying. Place was a lot grander then. You know that?”

  I told him I did.

  Nobody recognized me. Nobody commented that my only luggage was three hundred dollars worth of oversized books. Nobody appeared to carry the books to my room, which had one cracked window pane and a bedspread with cigarette burns. My books were the newest thing in the room, and the Historia Monstrorum was a 1948 reprint.

  I learned that the griffin was the most mysterious of tomb symbols. That it dated back to the second millennium. That the Minoan griffin was the one with the mane of black spiral curls. That the griffin was the most predatory of all mythical monsters, guarding treasures and feeding on live human hearts. That Milton had mentioned a “hippogriff,” presumably a hybrid of a hybrid. The Sumerians, Assyrians, Babylonians, Chaldeans, Egyptians, Myceneans, Indo-Iranians, Syrians, Scythians, and Greeks all had griffins. And so did Greater Los Angeles.

  I sat by the window past midnight, smoking and watching the sky, waiting for Gerry to call. Clouds scudded over the moon: fantastic shapes, writhing and soaring. Smoke rose from the end of my cigarette in spiral curls. Somewhere, beyond the window in the unseen darkness, something snapped.

  Once, when Brad had been very small, I had fallen sick with something-or-other; who can remember? But there had been fever, chills, nausea. The housekeeper had run off with the gardener and sixteen steaks. My soon-to-be-ex had been off doing what already-ex’s do; Richard always did like a jump on deadlines. The phone line had gone down in a windstorm. For forty-eight hours, it had been me, Brad, and several million germs. And at one point I had lost it, wailing louder than both wind and baby, lead performer in the Greek chorus.

  Brad had stopped dead and crept close to my bed. He peered at me, screwing up his small face. Then he had called jubilantly, “Towl! Towl!” and run to fetch a grimy dish rag with which to smear Liquid Gold across my face. This had become one of my most precious memories. What will I be when I grow up, Mommy ?

  There was wind tonight, blowing from the sea. I could smell it. Sometime past midnight, the phone rang.

  “Celia? Gerry. Listen, love—I’m coming up there.”

  “That bad? Come on, Gerry, tell me. We’re both too old for drama.”

  I could hear her thinking. As an agent, he used to conduct deals while pulling leaves off the ficus benjamina by his office phone. In a good year, his exfoliation topped United Logging’s.

  “He sold the waterfront properties, Celia. Both of them. Not a bad price, but invested wildly. And he’s too far extended. You can recover some if you clip his wings right now, today, but the whole house of cards will still be shaky. You’ll come out with less than a fourth of what you had, with the stock churning counted in. You’re not a bag lady on Sunset yet, but it’s not good. And it’s actionable.”

  “I hear something else you’re not telling me.”

  “The media is going wild. Cherlyn’s in labor.”

  “Now?”

  “Now.”

  “It’s only eight months!”

  “Yeah, but with this . . . baby, they’re saying the womb just couldn’t hold on any longer. That’s what they’re saying—what the hell do I know? I’m leaving now to get you.”

  “I’ll take a cab.”

  “You can’t afford it,” Gerry said brutally, and hung up. I understood. She would do whatever she could to persuade me to sue Brad. Maybe I would let her. I packed up my books and called a cab. Then I left the books on the ratty unused bed. The Conquistador seemed a good place for them.

  The cab could only get a block away from the hospital. I pushed my way on foot through the crowds, argued my way through the police cordon, slunk my way past the TV cameras, blustered my way through the lobby. “I’m Miss Lincoln’s mother-in-law.” “I’m Miss Lincoln’s mother.” “Miss Lincoln . . . the baby . . . the grandmother . . .”

  More TV, more reporters. Shouts, chaos, trampled styrofoam cups. A huge nurse in a blinding pink uniform grabbed my arm and hauled me into an elevator, closing the doors so fast I lost my purse.

  “Pretty fierce, huh?” she said, and laughed. Jowls of fat danced on her shoulders. She winked at me. I wished Brad had married her.

  He was in the recovery room with Cherlyn, but the main show was already over and a helpful intern hauled him out and then tactfully disappeared. I wished Brad had married him. Half-lit, the corridor had the hushed creepiness of all hospitals late at night.

  “Mother! You’re a grandma!”

  He wore a surgical gown and mask, looking like a natural. I opened my mouth to say—what? I still don’t know—but he rushed on. “She’s perfect! Wait till you see her! Little Angela Dawn. Perfect. And Cherlyn’s fine, she’s resting up for the press conference. Of course, we want you there, too! This is a great day!”

  “Brad—”

  “Perfect. You never saw such a baby,” which had of course to be true enough. “We’re going to bring her out wrapped up at first, let them see her face and hair—she’s got all this hair, dark like yours, Mother—and just gradually be persuaded to unwrap her. Maybe not even today. Maybe not even tom
orrow. We’ve forbidden cameras in the hospital, of course.”

  “I—”

  “Wait till you see her!” And then he stopped.

  And I knew. Knew before he turned to me in the middle of the hall, before he took my arm, before he smiled at me with that blinding sincerity that could sell vacuum tubes to Sony. I knew what he was going to say, and what I was going to say, although up till that moment it had been as much in doubt as Cherlyn’s cerebrum.

  He laid his hand on my shoulder. “You’ll want to set up a trust fund for your first grandchild.”

  “I’m suing you for mismanagement of funds.”

  We stared at each other. I felt suddenly exhausted, and sickened, and old. Towl, touil.

  “Wait!” a voice croaked. “Wait, wait, don’t start the press without me, you bastard!”

  Cherlyn wheeled herself around the corner in a pink motorized wheelchair, followed by a shocked and gibbering nurse. Cherlyn wore a pink gown with bunnies on it, but her hair still lay against her head in damp coils and sweat glistened on her forehead. One of the nurses grabbed at her hand to snatch it away from the “Forward” button; Cherlyn halfturned in her chair, clawed with three-inch nails at the nurse, and gasped with pain herself. I winced. An hour ago she had been in labor.

  “You were going without me! You were going without me!”

  I saw Brad’s state-of-the-art calculation. “Of course we weren’t, darling! Cherlyn, honey, you shouldn’t be up!”

  “You wanted to start without me, you bastard!”

  The nurse gasped, pressing a tissue to the wicked scratches on her arm. Brad knelt tenderly beside the wheelchair, murmuring endearments. Cherlyn gave him the look of Gorgon for Perseus. She tried to slap him, but winced again when she raised her hand.

  Brad shuffled backwards to avoid the slap and backed into the knees of a scandalized nurse carrying the baby. “Miss Lincoln! Miss Lincoln! You shouldn’t be up!”

  “Well, that’s what I told her,” said the first nurse, still holding her arm and glaring at Cherlyn.

  The baby nurse tried to squeeze past. Brad reached out and tried to take the baby, a pink-wrapped bundle, from her arms.