Fictions

by Nancy Kress

  The first day of school comes. By the end of third period, American Government, it is clear to you that Sally Corey has said something. When you walk into a room, certain girls snicker behind their hands. Certain boys make obscene gestures over their crotches. Very small obscene gestures.

  You spend fourth period hiding out in the men’s room. While you are there, hands bracing the stall closed while delinquent cigarette smoke comes and goes with the bang of the lavatory door, something happens to you. Fifth period you walk into Spanish III, coolly note the first boy to mock you, and listen for his name at roll call. Ben Robinson. You turn in your seat, look him straight in the eye long enough for him to start to wonder, then turn away. The rest of the period you conjugate Spanish verbs so the teacher can find out what useful information everybody already knows.

  At home, in front of the dollhouse, you close your eyes. Ben Robinson. Ben Robinson. You howl.

  There is a scuffling noise deep in the dollhouse.

  For an hour you work at your bench. The Chippendale sofa is finished; you are building a miniature American Flyer sled of basswood. It will have a barn-red finish and a rope of crochet cotton. You think of this sled, which you have never owned, as the heart of rural childhood.

  After an hour, you close your eyes again and concentrate on Ben Robinson. When you’re done, you inspect the dollhouse. The second-layer furniture that has been knocked over ever since the night with Sally Corey is now standing upright. On the bottom shelf of the first layer, which is coincidentally where you plan to put the American Flyer, you find very small, dry pellets. When you carefully lift them to your nose on the blade of an X-acto knife, they smell like dog turds.

  The second weekend in September there is a miniature show in the Dome Arena in the city. The pickup truck has something wrong with the motor. You take the bus, and spend time talking with craftsmen. To your own ears your voice sounds rusty; sometimes days go by without your speaking two sentences to the same person. At school you talk to no one. No one meets your eyes, although sometimes you hear people whispering behind you as you walk away from your locker or the water fountain. You never turn around.

  But here you are happy. An artisan describes to you the lost-wax method of casting silver. A miniature-shop owner discusses the uses of Fimo. You study room boxes from the eighteenth century and dollhouses extravagantly fitted for the twenty-first. You buy some miniature crown molding, wallpaper squares in a William Morris design, a kit to build a bay window, and a bronze bust of Beethoven seven eighths of an inch high.

  At home, the fruit cellar is not completely dark. Tiny lights gleam deep inside the dollhouse, too deep for you to see more than their reflected glow through doorways and windows. You stand very still. Only the outer two layers of the pile have any electrified rooms. Only in the last year have you learned how to wire miniature lamps and fake fireplaces.

  While you’re standing there, the small lights go out.

  You start skipping school one or two days a week. You aren’t learning anything there anyway. What does it matter if the tangent of the sine doesn’t equal the tangent of the cosine, or the verb estar doesn’t apply to permanent states of being? You are tired of dealing in negatives. You can’t imagine any permanent states of being.

  “Going out, son?” he asks. His hand trembles.

  “No,” you say. “Leave me alone!”

  Sometimes there are lights on deep in the dollhouse, sometimes not. Occasionally furniture has been moved from one room to another. The first time this happens, you move the wicker chair back from the Federal dining room to the Victorian sun porch, where it belongs. The next day it is back in the Federal dining room, pulled up to the table, which is set with tiny ceramic dishes. On some of the dishes are crumbs. You leave the wicker chair alone.

  At the end of September you find a tiny shriveled corpse on the third shelf of the bottom floor, in a compartment fitted like a garden. It’s King. The dried corpse has little smell. You cover it with a sheet of moss and carve a tombstone from a half-bar of hand soap your mother once brought from a hotel in New York.

  Once or twice, sitting late at your workbench, you catch the faint sound of music, tinny and thin, from an old-fashioned Victrola.

  “Listen,” Mr. Corey says, “this can’t go on.”

  You wipe your hands on your apron, which says COREY LUMBER in stitched blue lettering. In your opinion, the stitching is a very poor job. You’re thinking of reinforcing it at home. “What can’t go on?”

  He looks you straight in the eye, a big man with shoulders like hams, fat veined through the muscle. “You. You talk short and mean to customers. Yesterday you told old Mrs. Dallway her windows weren’t worth repairing, and your voice said she wasn’t worth it, neither. You never used to talk to people like that.”

  You say, “I keep the stock better than it’s ever been before.”

  “Yeah, and that’s another thing. It’s too good. Too neat.”

  You just look at him. He rubs a hand through his hair in frustration.

  “That’s not what I mean. Not too neat. Just too . . . it doesn’t have to be that exact. Paint cans lined up on the shelf with a ruler. The same number of screwdrivers in each bin. You fuss over it like an old hen. All the small crappy details. And then you’re rude to customers.”

  You turn slowly, very slowly, away.

  “Just forget the small stuff and concentrate on the service that people deserve, all right?” Mr. Corey’s tone is pleading now. He always liked you. You don’t care.

  “Yeah,” you say. “What they deserve. I will.”

  “Good kid,” Mr. Corey says, in tones that convince neither of you.

  Dazuki has a new dog, a pit bull. It’s chained in his front yard just short of the road. You stand by your mailbox and watch it stretch its chain, leaping and snarling. You go downcellar and give the dog two hours in the dollhouse, while you work on a nanny-bench kit from Little House on the Table. Banging and yelping, very faint, come from deep in the dollhouse. Once there is a grinding sound, like a dentist’s drill. Glass breaks. For the last twenty minutes, you add Dazuki himself.

  When you go back outside, about 7:30 P.M., the pit bull is lying across its chain. Its neck is bloody; one ear is tom. It catches sight of you and cowers. You go back inside.

  The nanny bench turns out perfectly.

  On Saturday afternoon Mr. Corey fires you. “Not for good, Billy,” he says, and somehow he is the supplicant, pleading with you. “Just take a few weeks off to think about things.

  We’re slow now anyway. In a few weeks you come back all rested, snap bang up to snuff again. Like you were.”

  “Sure,” you say. The syllable tastes hot, like coals. You take off your apron—you reinforced the stitching last night—and hand it to him. You seem to be seeing him from the small end of a telescope. He is tiny, distant, with few details.

  “Billy . . .” he says, but you don’t wait.

  The house is silent. In the mailbox is the new catalogue from Wee Three. Holding it, you go in through the kitchen, down the stairs, and jab the light switch in the fruit cellar. Nothing happens.

  You reach to the ceiling, remove one of the bulbs, and shake it. It doesn’t rattle. The disc-belt sander on your workbench won’t turn on. But inside the dollhouse are the reflections of lights. In the windowless dark of the fruit cellar they gleam like swamp gas.

  Upstairs, the refrigerator doesn’t hum. The kitchen lights won’t turn on. In the living room your father lies in a pool of his own vomit on your mother’s rug.

  You yank open the drawer in the scarred rolltop where bills are kept. It’s all there: Three monthly warnings from the electric company, followed by two announcements of service cutoff. Threatening letters from collection agencies. Politer ones from the bank that holds the mortgage. Your father’s pay stubs. The last one is dated four months ago.

  Your father is shrinking. He looks like Corey did: a speck viewed from the wrong end of a telescope. The speck d
ances randomly, a miniature turd in Brownian movement on the end of an X-acto blade. You realize you are shaking. You kick him, and he grows again in size, until he and his pool of vomit fill the living room and you have to get out.

  You go downcellar.

  More lights gleam inside the dollhouse, some of them a lurid red. The dentist-drill grinding is back. There are other noises, fitful and rasping but faint. Small. Very small.

  You close your eyes and the howl builds, against your father, against Corey, against the world. It builds and builds.

  Before the howl can escape, your mind is flooded with objects, all miniaturized, all familiar, whirling in the fireball path of some tiny meltdown. Your work apron is here—COREY LUMBER—and your mother’s rug, with all its stains. Sally’s Lollipop panties and the rolltop desk. The set of baseball cards you had when you were ten, and the set of Wedgwood china inexplicably left to you in your grandmother’s will. Your mother’s hairbrush, the old cookie jar with the faded green giraffes, even the pickup truck, Uttered with McDonald’s wrappers. Everything rushes at you: small, petty, and in shreds. The rug has been chewed. The desk legs, broken off, he among shredded books. Splinters that were once nursery toys catch at the inside of your eyelids. Shards of Wedgwood are razor-sharp. Everything whirls together in a space of your soul that is shrinking still more, contracting like a postnova star, collapsing in on itself to the howl of a frightened dog.

  Your yell comes out. “Nooooooooo . . .”

  You open your eyes. The fruit cellar is completely dark.

  You grope your way upstairs, outside, gulping huge draughts of air. It is later than it could possibly be. Orion hangs over the eastern horizon. It is past midnight.

  You lean against the mailbox for support, and look up at the vast immensities of the stars.

  In a few more minutes you will go back inside. You’ll clean up your father and get him to bed. You’ll start to sort through the bills and notices and make a list of phone numbers to call. In the morning you’ll call Mr. Corey, set up an appointment to talk to him. You’ll use ammonia on the rug.

  And then you’ll bring the dollhouse upstairs, layer by layer, piece by piece. Even though there’s no place to put it all. Even though the miniatures that you made won’t look nearly as realistic by sunlight, and some of the tiny pieces will surely end up lost among the large-scale furniture in the rest of the house.

  THE BATTLE OF LONG ISLAND

  The horrors of war are difficult to face, even for a noncombatant nurse. How much harder when there are two battles—one on the field, and one in your heart?

  Over by the mess tent one of my younger nurses is standing close to a Special Forces lieutenant, watch her face tip up to his, her eyes wide and shining, moonlight on her cheekbones. He reaches out one hand—his fingernails are not quite dean—and touches her brown hair where it falls over her shoulder, and the light on her skin trembles. I know that later tonight they will disappear into her tent, or his.

  Later this week they with walk around the compound with their arms around each other’s waists, sit across from each other at mess, and feed each other choice bits of chow, oblivious to the amused glances of their friends.

  Later this month—or next month, or the one after that if this bizarre duty goes on long enough—she will be pale and distraught, crumpling letters in one hand. She will cry in the supply tent She s will tell the other nurses that he fed her lies.

  She will not hear orders, or will carry them out red-eyed and wrong, endangering other lives and despising her own.

  She will be useless to me, and I will have to, and I will have to transfer her out and start over with another.

  Or maybe it won’t happen that way. An alternate future. He will snap at his buddies, volunteer for extra duty near the Hole, become careless with some red or homespun coated soldier stumbling forward with a musket or bayonet. He’ll tail somebody or—less likely—get killed himself. Or maybe he’ll just snap at the wrong person—his captain, say. He’ll be transferred out. If he kills an Arrival. General Robinson will personally crucify him. General Robinson s wife and daughters are members of the D.A.R.

  The two people by the mess tent, of course, don’t see it this way. They like the same movies, were snubbed by the same people in high school, voted the same way in the last presidential election. Both volunteered for duty by the Hole. It follows that they’re in love. It follows that they understand each other, can see to the bottoms of each other’s souls. The other military couples they know—the ones who have divorced, or who haven’t; the affairs on leave; the angry words on the parade ground at dawn—have nothing to do with them. They are different. They are unique.

  When people can see the truth so plain around them, why do they persist in believing some other reality.

  “Major Peters! You re needed in Recovery! Quick!”

  I leave my tent and tear across the compound at a dead run. We have only three people in Recovery; one of the weird laws Of the Hole seems to be that they seldom come through it if they’re going to recover. Musket balls in the belly or heart, shell explosions that have torn off half a head. Eighty-three percent of the Arrivals are dead a few minutes after they fail through the Hole. Another 11 percent live longer but never regain consciousness. That leaves us with 6 percent who eventually talk, although not to us. After we repair the flesh and boost the immune system, the Army sends heavily armored trucks to move them out of our heavily armored compound to somewhere else. The Pentagon? We aren’t told. Somewhere there are three soldiers from Kichline’s Riflemen, a field-grade officer under Lord Percy, and a shell-shocked corporal in homespun, all talking to the best minds the country thinks it can find.

  This time I want to talk first.

  The soldier who has finally woken up is a grizzled veteran who came through dressed in breeches, boots, and light coat. It’s summer on the other side of the Hole: The Battle of Long Island was fought on August 27, 1776. Unlike most Arrivals, this one staggered through the Hole without his rifle or bayonet, although he had a hunting knife, which was taken away from him. He’d received a head wound, most likely a glancing shell fragment, enough to cause concussion but, according to the brain scan, not permanent damage. When I burst into Recovery, he’s sitting up, dazed, looking at the guards at the door holding their M-18s.

  “The General and Dr. Bechtel are on their way,” I say to the guards, which is approximately true. I sent a soldier walking across the compound to tell them. My phone seems to be malfunctioning. The soldier is walking very slowly.

  “General Putnam?” the new Arrival asks. His voice is less dazed than his face: a rough, deep voice with the peculiar twist on almost-British English that still sends a chill through me all these months after the Hole opened.

  “Were you with the Connecticut Third Regiment? Let me check your pulse, please, I’m a nurse.”

  “A nurse!” That seems to finish the daze; he looks at my uniform, then my face. When the Hole first opened, there was wild talk of putting the medical staff in Colonial dress—“To minimize the psychological shock.” As if anything could minimize dying hooked to machines you couldn’t imagine in a place that didn’t exist while being stuck with needles by people unborn for another two centuries. Cooler heads prevailed. I wear fatigues, my short hair limp against my head from a shower, my glasses thick over my eyes.

  “Yes, a nurse. This is a hospital. Let me have your wrist, please.”

  He pulls his hand away. I grab his wrist and hold it firmly. Two Arrivals have attacked triage personnel and one attacked a Recovery guard; this soldier looks strong enough for both. But I served in the minor action in Kuwait and the major ones in Colombia. He lets me hold his wrist. His pulse is rapid but strong.

  “What is this place?”

  “I told you. A hospital.”

  He leans forward and clutches my arm with his free hand while I’m reaching for the medscan equipment. “The battle—who won the battle?”

  They’re often like
this. They find themselves in an alien, impossible, unimaginable place, surrounded by guards with uniforms and weapons they don’t recognize, and yet their first concern is not their personal fate but the battle they left behind. They ask again and again. They have to know what happened.

  We aren’t supposed to tell Arrivals anything not directly medical No hint that this is more than a few days into their future. That’s official policy. Not until the Military Intelligence experts are finished with whatever they do, wherever they do it. Not until the Pentagon has assured itself that the soldier, the Hole itself, is not some terrorist plot (whose, for Christ’s sweet fucking sake?). Were “not qualified for this situation.” (Who do they imagine is?) Those are my orders.

  But he hasn’t asked for very much future: The Battle of Long Island was over in less than 24 hours. And I, of all people, am not capable of denying anyone the truth of his past.

  “The Colonists lost. Washington retreated.”

  “Ahhhhhhhhhhh . . .” He lets it out like escaping gas. In Bogota, in the ‘95 offensive, lethal gas wiped out 3,000 men in an hour. I don’t look directly at his face.

  “You were hit in the head,” I say. “Not badly.”

  He puts his hand to his head and fingers the bandage, but his eyes never leave mine. He has a strong, fierce face, with sunken black eyes, a hooked nose, broken teeth, and a beard coming in red, not gray. He could be anywhere from forty to sixty. It’s not a modern face; today the Army would fix the teeth and shave the beard.

  “And the General? Put survived the battle?”

  “He did.”

  “Ahhhhhhhh . . . And the war? How goes the war?”

  I have said far too much already. The soldier sits straight on his bed, his fierce eyes blazing. Behind us I hear the door open and the guards snap into salute. In those Colonial eyes is a need to know that has nothing in it of weakness. It isn’t a plea, or a beseeching. It’s a demand for a right, as we today might demand a search warrant, or a lawyer, or a trial by jury—all things whose existence once depended on what this soldier wants to know. He stares at me and I feel in him an elemental power, as if the need to know is as basic as the need for water, or air.