Fictions

by Nancy Kress

  Strickland gazes at the Hessian. “A boy. To do their fighting for ‘em.” The rough voice is heavy with sarcasm.

  “From De Heister’s troops,” I say, to say something.

  “Put always traded ‘em back.”

  “It must have been hard for them, to go so far from their homes,” the nurse on duty, says tentatively. She has a high, fluttery voice. Strickland looks at her with irony, a much more surprising expression on that rough face than sarcasm, and she flushes. He laughs.

  The German boy opens his eyes. His blurry gaze falls on Strickland, who again wears his own breeches and shirt and coat, with the strip of red cloth of a field sergeant sewn onto the right shoulder. The Hessian is probably in a lot of pain, but even so, his face brightens.

  “Mein Felowebel! Wir haben die sch-lact gewinnen, ja?”

  The Military Intelligence colonel’s eyes widen. Strickland’s face turns to stone. Orr makes a quick gesture and the next minute both Strickland and I are being firmly escorted out of Recovery. Strickland shakes off the MP’s arm and turns angrily to me.

  “What did he mean, ‘Mein Felowebel’ ? And, ‘Wir haben die sch-lact gewinnen’ ?”

  I shake my head. “I don’t speak German.”

  Strickland looks at me a moment longer, trying to see if I’m telling the truth. Evidently he sees from my face that I am. We stare at each other in the sunlight, while I wonder what the hell is happening. Orr emerges from Recovery long enough to snap an order at the MP, who escorts Strickland back to his quarters.

  In my own quarters I fish out the German-American _ dictionary I bought when I thought I was being sent to Stuttgart instead of Brooklyn. It takes a long time to track down spellings in a language I don’t speak, especially since I’m guessing at the dialect and at words I’ve only heard twice. Outside, two passing soldiers improvise a song-test: “There’s a Hole in the battle, dear Gen’ral, dear Gen’ral; there’s a Hole in the battle, dear Gen’ral, a Ho-oo-ole.” Finally I piece together a translation of the German sentence.

  My sergeant! We won the battle, yes?

  I try to think about everything that would have had to be different in the world for Frederick II of Hesse-Kassel to furnish mercenaries to the Colonial patriots instead of to the British, I can’t do it; I don’t know enough history. A moment later, I realize how dumb that is: There’s a much simpler explanation. De Heister’s Hessian could simply have deserted, changing sides in midwar. Loyalties were often confused during the Revolution. Desertion was probably common, even among mercenaries.

  Desertion is always common.

  My mother was born in 1935, but she didn’t graduate from college until 1969. All her life, which ended in a car crash, she kept the conviction of her adopted generation that things are only good before they settle into formula and routine. She marched against the draft, against Dow Chemical, against capitalism, against whaling. She was never for anything. Shoulder to shoulder with a generation that refused to trust anyone over thirty, this thirty-three year old noisily demonstrated her hatred for rules.

  All my childhood I never knew if I was supposed to be home for dinner by 6:00, or 6:30, or at all. I never knew if the men she dated would return again, or be showered with contemptuous scorn, or move in. I never knew if the electricity would suddenly be cut off. While I was doing my algebra homework, or when we would move again in the middle of the night, leaving the gas bill shredded and the rent unpaid. I never knew anything. My mother told me we were “really” rich, we were dirt poor, we were wanted by the law, we were protected by the law. At 17, I ran away from home and joined the Army, which put me through nursing school.

  My mother is buried in Dansville, New York, which I once saw from a Greyhound Bus. It’s a small town with orderly nineteenth-century storefronts and bars full of middle-aged men in John Deere caps. These men, who pay their mortgages faithfully, stand beside their bar stools and argue in favor of capital punishment, confiscation of drug dealers’ cars, the elimination of Welfare, and the NRA. On summer weekends they throw rocks at the Women’s Peace Collective enclave off Route 63. The Dansville cemetery is kept neatly mowed and clipped. I chose the burial plot myself.

  Captain John Percy Healy of His Majesty’s Twenty-Third Foot is kept under close guard. Strickland couldn’t get anywhere near him, even if he knew that Healy and his winter-clad Battle of Long Island existed. Nor can he get near the Hole, although he tries. The summer sun is slanting in long lines over the compound when he breaks away from the Ml colonel and the bodyguard MP and me and sets off at a dead run toward the Hole. His head is down, his powerful legs pumping. As each leg lifts, I see a hole in the sole of his left boot flash and disappear, flash and disappear.

  “Halt!” shouts Colonel Orr. ‘The guards at the Hole raise their weapons. The MP, whose fault this escape is, starts to run after Strickland, realizes he can’t possibly catch him, and draws his gun. “Halt, or we’ll fire!”

  They do. Strickland goes down, hit in the leg. He drags himself toward the Hole on his elbows, his body thrashing from side lo side on the hard ground, a thin line of blood trickling behind. I can’t see’ his face. The MP reaches him before I do-and Strickland fights him fiercely, in silence.

  Three more soldiers are on him.

  I’ve seen more direct combat nursing than any other nurse I’ve met personally, but in OR I can’t look at Strickland’s eyes. If he had reached the Hole, he could have gone through, and I’m the only person in the room who knows this. Not even Strickland knows it. He only acted as if he did.

  Dr. Bechtel sends for me the next morning. He’s the chief of medical staff. I go.

  “Susan, I think . . .”

  “ ‘Major,’ sir. I would prefer to be called ‘Major.’ Sir.”

  He doesn’t change expression. “Major, I think it would be a good idea if you requested a transfer to another unit.”

  I draw a deep breath. “Are you rotating me out, sir?”

  “No!” For a second some emotion breaks through anger? fear? guilt?—and then is gone. “I’m suggesting you voluntarily apply for a transfer. You’re not doing your career any good here, with Strickland, not the way things have turned out. There are too many anomalies. The Army doesn’t like anomalies, Major.”

  “The entire Hole is an anomaly. Sir.”

  He permits himself a thin smile. “True enough. And the Army doesn’t like it.”

  “I don’t want to transfer.”

  He looks at me directly. “Why not?”

  “I prefer not to, sir,” I say. Is answering ‘no answer’ an anomaly? I can feel every tendon in my body straining toward the door. And yet there is a horrible fascination, loo, in staring at him like this. Somewhere in my mind a four-year-old girl touches a one-eyed doll in a raveled red dress. Here. He touched me here. Arid here . . . But did he?

  The four-year-old doesn’t answer.

  “Strickland is asking to see you,” he says wearily. “No—demanding-to see you. Somewhere he saw Healy’s uniform. Being carried across the parade ground from the cleaning machine, maybe—I don’t know. He won’t say.”

  I picture Healy’s heavy watch, coat, his red uniform with the regimental epaulets on both shoulders, his crimson sash.

  “Strickland’s smart,” I say slowly, and immediately regret it. I’m participating in the conversation as if it were normal. I don’t want to give him that.

  “Yes,” my father says, a shade too eagerly. “He’s figured out that there are multiple realities beyond the Hole. Multiple Battles of Long Island. Maybe even entirely different American Revolutions . . . I don’t know.” He passes a hand through his hair and I’m jolted by an unexpected memory, shimmery and dim: my Daddy at the dinner table, talking and passing a hand through his hair, myself in a highchair with round beads on the tray, beads that spin and slide. “The Pentagon moves him out tomorrow.”

  “Strickland?”

  “Yes, of course, that’s who we’ve been talking about,” He peers at me, I give
him nothing, wooden-faced. Abruptly he says, “Susan—ask for a transfer.”

  “No, sir,” I say. “Not unless that’s an order.”

  We stand at opposite ends of the bunker, and the air shimmers between us.

  “Dismissed,” he says quietly. I salute and leave, but as I reach the door, he tries once more. “I recommend that you don’t see Strickland again. No matter what he demands. For the sake of your own career.”

  “Recommendation noted, sir,” I say, without inflection.

  Outside, the night is hot and still. I have trouble breathing the stifling air. I try to think what could have prompted my father’s sudden concern with my career, but no matter how I look at it, I can’t see any advantage to him in keeping me away from Strickland. Only to myself. The air trembles with heat lightning. Beyond the compound, at the Brooklyn Zoo, an elephant bellows, as if in pain.

  The next day the Hole closes.

  I’m not there at the time—0715 hours EDT—but one of the guards retells the story in the mess tent. “There was this faint pop, like a kid’s toy gun. Yoder hit the dirt and pissed his pants—”

  “I did not! Fuck you!” Yoder yells, and there are some good-natured insults and pointless shoving before anybody can overhear what actually did happen.

  “This little pop, and the shimmer kinda disappeared, and that was it. Special Forces showed up and they couldn’t get in—”

  “When could they ever?” someone says slyly, a female voice, and there are laughter and nudges.

  “And that was it. The Hole went bye-bye,” the guard says, reclaiming group attention.

  “So when do we go home?”

  “When the Army fucking says you do.”

  They move Strickland out the next day. I don’t see him. No one reports if he asks for me. Probably not. At some point Strickland decided that his trust in me was misplaced, born of one of those chance moments of emotion that turn out to be less durable than expected. I wasn’t able to help him toward the Hole. All I was able to do was tell him military information that may or may not be true for a place and time that he can’t ever reach again.

  Curiously enough, it is the Brit, Major John Healy, to whom we make a difference.

  He is with us a week before they move him, recovering from his injuries. The broken leg sets clean. Military Intelligence, in the form of Colonel Orr, goes in and out of his heavily guarded bunker several times a day. Orr is never there while I’m changing Healy’s dressings or monitoring his vitals, but Healy is especially thoughtful after Orr has left. He watches me with a bemused expression, as if he wonders what I’m thinking.

  He’s nothing like Strickland. Slight, fair, not tall, with regular features and fresh-colored skin. Healy’s speech is precise and formal, courteous, yet with a mocking gaiety in it. Even here, which seems to me a kind of miracle. He’s fastidious about his dress, and a military orderly actually learns to black boots.

  Between debriefings, Healy reads. He requested the books himself, all published before 1776; but maybe that’s all he’s permitted. Gulliver’s Travels. Robinson Crusoe. Poems by somebody called Alexander Pope. I’ve never been much of a reader, but I saw the MGM movie about Crusoe, and I look up the others. They’re all books about men severely displaced. Once Healy, trying to make conversation, tells me that he comes from London, where his family has a house in Tavistock Place, also a “seat” in Somerset.

  i refuse to be drawn into conversation with him.

  On the day they’re going to move him, Bechtel does a complete medical.

  I assist. Naked, with electrodes attached to his head and vials of blood drawn from his arm, Healy suddenly becomes unstoppably talkative.

  “In London, the physicians make use of leeches to accomplish your identical aims.”

  Bechtel smiles briefly.

  “In my London, that is. Not in yours. There is a London here, I presume, Doctor?”

  “Yes,” Bechtel says. “There is.”

  “Then there exist two. But there’s rather more, isn’t there? One for the Hessian. One for that Colonial who attempted escape back through the . . . the time corridor. Probably others, is that not so?”

  “Probably,” Bechtel says. He studies the EKG printout.

  “And in some of these Londons, we put down the Rebellion, and in others, you Colonials succeed in declaring yourself a sovereign nation, and perhaps in still others, the savages destroy you all and the Rebellion never even occurs. Have I understood the situation correctly?”

  “Yes,” Bechtel says. He looks at the Brit now, and I am caught by the look as well—by its unexpected compassion.

  The vial of blood in my hand seems to pound against my temples.

  My mother told me, when I was eight, that my father had caused the war then raging in Vietnam.

  I say nothing.

  “Then,” Healy continues in his beautiful, precise, foreign voice, “there must exist several versions of this present as well. Some of them must, by simple deduction, be more appealing than this one.” He glances around the drab bunker. Beyond the barred window, an American flag flies over the parade ground. Couldn’t we have spared him the constant sight of his enemy’s flag?

  Then I remember that he probably doesn’t even recognize it. The stars-and-stripes wasn’t adopted by the Continental Congress until 1777.

  “This compound is not the whole of our present,” Bechtel says, too gently. “The rest is much different.”

  Healy waves a hand, smiling. “Oh, quite. I’m convinced you have marvels abounding, including your edition of London. Which, since I cannot return to my own, I hope to one day visit.” The smile wavers slightly, but in a moment he has it back. “Of course, it will not be even the descendent of my own. I must be prepared for that. In this history, you Colonials fought the Battle of Long Island in the summer.”

  “Yes,” Bechtel says. “My own history is apparently quite unrecoverable. Your historical tactician tells me that no connection appears to exist between this place and whichever of those histories is mine. And so I cannot, of course, know what might have happened in the course of my own war, any more than you can know.” He watches Bechtel closely. All this is said in that same mocking, light-hearted voice. I can hear that voice in London drawing rooms, amid ladies in panniers and high-dressed curls, who know better than to believe a word such an amusing rake ever says.

  Bechtel lays down the printout and steps toward Healy’s cot. Instinctively the Brit reaches for the coat of his uniform and pulls it around his shoulders. Bechtel waits until Healy is draped in his remnants of the British Empire. Then Bechtel speaks in a voice both steady and offhand, as if it were calculated to match the careless facade of Healy’s own bravery.

  “You must choose the reality you prefer. Look at it this way, Captain, You don’t know for sure who won the war in your time, or who survived it, or what England or the United States became after your November 16, 1776. Your past is closed to you. So you’re free to choose whatever one you wish. You can live as if your choice is your past. And in so doing, make it real.”

  I move carefully at my station, feeding Healy’s blood samples into the Hays-Mason analyzer.

  Healy says, with that same brittle gaiety, “You are urging me to an act of faith, sir.”

  “Yes, if you like,” Bechtel says. He looks at me. “But I would call it an act of choice.”

  “Choice that I am not a prisoner de guerre, from a losing army, of a war I may or may not have survived?”

  “Yes.”

  “I will consider what you say, sir,” Healy says, and turns away. The epaulets on his shoulders tremble, but it may have been the light. From the parade ground beyond the window comes the sound of a jeep with a faulty muffler.

  “I’ve finished here,” Bechtel tells the guard, who relays the information over his comlink.

  They remove Healy in a wheelchair, although it’s obvious he doesn’t like this. As he’s wheeled past, he catches at my arm. His blue eyes smile, but his fi
ngers dig into my flesh. I don’t allow myself to wince. “Mistress Nurse—are there ladies where I’m going? Shall I have the society of your sex?”

  I look at him. Not even a hint of how Lieutenant Mary Inghram died has leaked to the outside press. Her parents were told she died in an explosives accident; I signed the report myself. When the Pentagon takes the Arrivals from our compound, they vanish as completely as if they’d never existed, and not even an electronic-data trail, the hunting spoor of the twenty-first century, remains. Ladies? The society of my sex? How would I know?

  “Yes,” I say to Healy. “You will.” The tent is empty except for Bechtel and me. I clean and stow the equipment; he scrubs at the sink. His back is to me. Very low, so that I barely hear him over the running water, he says, “Susan . . .”

  “All right,” I say. “I choose. You did it.” I walk out of the bunker. Some soldiers stand outside, at parade rest, listening to their sergeant read the orders for move-out. Guards still ring the place where the Hole used to be. In the sky, above the Low Radar Barrier, a seagull wheels and cries. The elephant is silent. I have never seen my father since.

  You might think I should have chosen differently. You might think, given the absence of proof, that like any jury empowered by the Constitution of the United States, I should choose the more innocent reality. Should believe that my father never molested me and that my mother, who is now beyond both proof and innocence, lied. The trial evidence is inconclusive, the character evidence cloudy. If I choose that reality, I gain not only a father, but peace of mind. I free myself from the torments of a past that might not even have happened.

  But I would-still be this Susan Peters. I would still watch my nurses tremble with love in the moonlight, and I would still see clearly the deceptions and hurt ahead, the almost inevitable anger. I would still recoil if a man brushes against me accidentally away from the hospital, and still pride myself on never wincing at anything within a hospital. I would still know that I chose Army nursing precisely because here dangerous men are at their weakest, and most vulnerable, and in greatest need of what I can safely give them.