Fictions

by Nancy Kress

  If Castle’s Legal was anything like Zircon’s Legal, “ecstatic” would never describe them. But Yoder recognized from Castle’s tone that this was a nonnegotiable. The twenty-seventh was the best he was going to get. Tone was everything.

  “Fantastic!” Yoder said. “Bring me up to speed on the details.”

  He took rapid notes. Tiffany appeared in the doorway, waiting nervously until he was off the phone.

  “Mr. Yoder . . . there’s a man here.”

  “Who?”

  “He won’t give his name.”

  “Send him away.” Salesmen with automotive accessories came with Yoder’s job; salesmen who didn’t give their names weren’t worth bothering with.

  “He says it’s personal,” Tiffany said. She ducked her head, and the woodpecker topknot swooped and bobbed. “He’s a little strange, Mr. Yoder.”

  “Send him in,” Yoder said. His throat felt dry. Now what?

  “Hello, Jack,” Tom Navik said. “Long time no see.”

  Yoder stood slowly and offered his hand. Tom grabbed him in a bear hug and burst into tears.

  “Damn, Jackie-boy, I’m so damn sorry! I just heard yesterday!” Tom had been his best friend from the fourth grade on. He had hunted frogs with Tom, hunted summer jobs, hunted girls, hunted colleges. He had hunted an A A group for Tom the day after Tom had thrown a two-hundred-pound off-duty policeman through the men’s room door at Barber’s Bar and Grill. He had visited Tom in the county jail, in the drying-out institute, in a succession of seedy boarding houses until they’d lost track of each other. Tom had been at the center of two decades of Yoder’s life, the pick-up in its engine. There was nobody Yoder wanted to see less.

  “Tom,” Yoder said, crushed against Tom’s stained down vest and tom T-shirt, “I’m not dead.”

  “Denial,” Tom said. “A normal stage in the grief process. Don’t fight it, Jackie-boy.”

  Yoder struggled free. “I’m not having a grief process!”

  “I understand. When my mother died, I went through the same thing. It takes six months to a year to work through.”

  Yoder made a strangled sound.

  “Look, I can’t stay,” Tom said. “I have a client waiting. I do life-trauma counseling, that’s how I heard about you. I just wanted to stop by with my condolences. How’s Sarah?”

  “Fine. What’s how you—”

  “Great girl, Sarah,” Tom said. “Well, take care, buddy.”

  “Wait! What’s ‘how you learned about’ me? Is there some sort of list or—”

  “Yeah, there is, but this time Diane told me. We stay in touch.”

  “Diane! Wait, Tom—”

  “Mr. Yoder,” Tiffany said, “Mr. Castle again on line two.”

  “Not now!” Yoder snapped. “Tom, do you see Diane? Wait a minute—”

  “I’m sorry,” Tiffany said huffily. “You just told me to put Mr. Castle through anytime.”

  “My client can’t wait, either,” Tom said. “Take care, Jackie-boy.”

  “Can we have lunch? No, wait, Tiffany, I’m sorry, I’ll take the call, I didn’t mean to snap at you—”

  “Not today,” Tom said, edging out the door. His sneakers were untied. “I’m having lunch with my mother.”

  “I thought you said your mother—”

  “Hey, John!” Castle said heartily from the speakerphone. “Can you call ’em, or what? Twenty minutes after I talk to you and we hit a snag. The fleet delivery can’t happen until the twenty-eighth. But not to worry—I’ve fixed it up with the union for a Sunday volume delivery, and of course we’ll eat the overtime ourselves. So everything’s still Go.”

  “Bill, could I call you back? I’m firefighting on this end—”

  “Sure, no problem. If I’m out, just keep trying.”

  But the elevator and lobby held only business suits hurrying to meetings.

  Shaken, Yoder returned to his office and stared at the phone. After a long while he called home, but Sarah was out. He dialed his brother Sam.

  Alaska was five hours behind; it was only 4:32 on Prince William Sound. Sam, who was with the EPA, had been there for nearly a year, working on a major oil-spill cleanup. Yoder hadn’t seen his brother in three years. Ordinarily they had little to say to each other and so fell into childhood reminiscences that after a while only made both of them feel more like strangers.

  Sam answered sleepily. “Hello?”

  “Sam, it’s John. Your brother.”

  “Hello? Hello?”

  “Sam, it’s John.”

  “Is anyone there? Hello?”

  “It’s John!”

  Sam hung up.

  Yoder called in Tiffany. “I want you to dial this number and ask for Charlie. Right now, on my phone. Do it, please.”

  Tiffany looked at him oddly. She dialed Sam’s number. Yoder could hear it ringing faintly. “Yes?” Tiffany said. “May I speak to Charlie? . . . Oh, I’m sorry. Please excuse the inconvenience.” She hung up. “Mr. Yoder, you gave me the wrong number, there’s no one there named—Are you all right, Mr. Yoder?”

  “No,” Yoder said shakily. “Yes. Thank you, Tiffany.”

  “Well, if you’re all right . . . You had another call while your visitor was here. Mr. Selenski at Selenski Universal. He wanted to know who would be handling his account from now on.”

  Selenski Universal, despite the grandiose name, was a small, family-owned, rock-honest company that supplied discount tuneups and lube jobs for headquarters company cars. Tiffany didn’t meet Yoder’s eyes.

  “Did any other service suppliers call?” Yoder asked.

  “No, Mr. Yoder.”

  Maybe, Yoder thought wearily, Selenski was the only service supplier who read the obituaries. Or maybe he was on whatever official notification list reached Tom and Diane. It wouldn’t have surprised Yoder. The Selenskis made a point of employing the handicapped. To Tiffany, peering at him anxiously, he said, “Tell Mr. Selenski I’m still handling the account. Tell him the obituary was a mistake.”

  “Okay,” Tiffany said. “And Charlie, at this number—you want me to keep trying?”

  “No,” Yoder said. “It wouldn’t do any good.”

  He went back to the McMillan Building on his lunch hour. The Bureau of Contemporary Statistics was open, but the fat black woman was not there. Behind the counter stood a tall thin man in his twenties with a stringy ponytail halfway down his back and wire-rimmed glasses. He wore tom jeans, a T-shirt that said ANIMAL HAVE RIGHTS, TOO, and a button proclaiming MALE FEMINIST. It occurred to Yoder that if he had indeed sold out, at least he was now spared the activist wardrobe.

  “Can I help you?” Stringy Ponytail asked. Like the fat black woman, he had a kind, pleasant voice.

  “I’m John Patrick Yoder. You declared me dead yesterday.”

  “I’m sorry,” Stringy Ponytail said. “That must be hard, man.”

  “You don’t really think it’s hard,” Yoder said harshly. “You think it’s deserved.”

  Stringy Ponytail didn’t deny this.

  “So now I can’t even talk to my own brother, is that it? Because he’s on the side of the angels and I’m not? Well, answer me this—how come I could talk to Diane? And Tom? They could hear me, but Sam couldn’t! Does that make sense?”

  “For thousands of years people have thought that death made no sense,” Stringy Ponytail said softly. He didn’t deny that Yoder couldn’t talk to Sam, or had talked to Diane. It occurred to Yoder that this guy probably never denied anything.

  For just a moment he wondered how that would feel.

  “Screw ‘thousands of years’ ! Why can’t my brother hear me on the telephone but you can in person?”

  “I’m not sure,” Stringy Ponytail said quietly. “Each death is different. But, hey, if it helps you deal with it, consider vampires.”

  “Vampires?”

  “People can see them in person but not in a mirror, right? Sort of like your case. Technology, man.” Stringy Ponytail shook hi
s head regretfully. “We’ve really screwed ourselves up with technology.”

  “Well, what am I supposed to do, you bastard?” Yoder yelled. Vampires! Technology!

  Stringy Ponytail fixed him with a steady stare. “Whatever you choose, brother. Whatever you choose.”

  “I don’t want to be like you again, damn it!”

  “We don’t particularly want you, either,” Stringy Ponytail said, and buried himself in a copy of Garbage News: The Magazine of Recycling. He didn’t look up when Yoder left.

  Halfway down the corridor Yoder turned back. “I want Diane Harding’s number,” he blustered as he strode into the Bureau. But the ugly little office was empty, the side door locked. A hand-lettered sign propped on the counter said back after the demonstration ends.

  Yoder didn’t know there was a demonstration. Or what anybody might be demonstrating for.

  At the commuter station on the way home, Yoder bought a newspaper. The demonstration was against nuclear power. Yoder was actually in favor of nuclear power; it seemed to him the only viable approach to future energy, despite the unsolved technical and disposal difficulties. His position was not a frivolous one. He had researched the subject, thought about it.

  The governor had vetoed a bill reinstating the death penalty. Yoder was in favor of the death penalty, and had been since his aunt, his mother’s sister, had been killed by a serial murderer while hanging up clothes in her own back yard. It seemed to Yoder that a society that genuinely valued life must be willing to demand its forfeiture for murder. Anything less was a false valuing of the victim’s life. He had thought about this, too.

  If you thought about things, and your thought yielded change of viewpoint, did that mean your soul was dead? If you’d rather live in a suburban tract house with decent schools than a rural commune without running water, did that mean you were bad karma? If you’d rather make a living to support your family than hand out paper flowers in an airport, did that mean you were plastic? Or did it just mean you’d grown up?

  Anger billowed in Yoder. He yanked the paper open to the obituaries, looking for youthful deaths, ANDERSON, BARBARA, 39; shoemaker, DOUGLAS, 53; BROWNLESS, EDWARD, 43, suddenly . . . Where did these lunatics get off judging him? Who had that right?

  “Fuck paper flowers,” he said aloud, and a woman in a Donna Karan suit grimaced and moved away from him, wrinkling her nose. The nose-wrinkle suddenly angered him: Now he was being shunned by the righteous and the fellow damned. “Fuck you, too,” he said to her, and when she turned to stare icily he saw that she was Diane. Diane with her brown hair in a smart geometrical cut, her briefcase polished, her Charles Jourdan shoes.

  “Diane! Wait, Diane, it’s me—”

  “If you take one step more towards me, buddy,” Diane’s voice said, “I’ll scream at the top of my lungs.”

  Yoder backed away. His heart pounded. In a second she was gone.

  Sarah waited for him in the living room, standing rigid beside the CD speakers, her eyes steely. A suitcase rested at her feet. For a dazed moment Yoder thought she knew about Diane, but that was crazy—there wasn’t anything to know about Diane.

  “Carol Sanderson called me today,” Sarah said. “She told me you and she’d been having an affair for several months.”

  Yoder wished fervently that Sarah were not so direct. Directness was so hard to counter, so difficult to finesse . . .

  “She was crying,” Sarah said, conspicuously dry-eyed. “Her mother sent her the obituary. She wanted to know if you’d sent her any last words.”

  “Oh my God,” Yoder said.

  “Precisely. How could you have an affair with a woman dumb enough to tell her mother about it?”

  “I. . .”

  “And dumb enough to think you’d have any last words for her that you’d send through your wife. God, Yoder, you sure can pick ’em.”

  For a moment Yoder had had some hope—the dry eyes, the raillery about his choice—but now it died. Sarah only called him “Yoder” when she was furious. And her calm furies were always the worst. How angry was she?

  “Sarah, I don’t know what to say, I—”

  “At least I picked somebody with taste. Brad Ryan would never have called you just because he saw my obituary.”

  That angry. Yoder felt physical pain, as if someone had knifed him in the belly. Brad Ryan . . . Sarah watched him, icily. Like Diane at the station. Who wasn’t Diane, and was. Brad Ryan . . .

  “I’m not actually leaving you,” Sarah said in a clear, hard voice. She kicked the suitcase at her feet. “After all, I’m just as guilty as you. Or maybe not quite as guilty—mine was just a one-nighter, after you’d been gone every night for three solid weeks. But we can compare guilts later, Yoder. Right now I’m going to a motel to think about what a schmuck you’ve become.”

  “Don’t go,” Yoder said. And then—suddenly, bizarrely, “I’m not dead!”

  “Oh, yes, you are,” Sarah said. “You just don’t know it yet, you poor bastard.”

  Before Yoder could answer, Sarah gave a muffled shriek and clapped her hand over her mouth. Dale stood in the doorway, his gaze traveling coldly from one parent to the other, his eyes full of hate but his hair sticking up on the top of his head, exactly the way it used to do when he was a little boy and crawled trustingly into Yoder’s lap for a bedtime story.

  Yoder sat up all night. Sarah didn’t return. Dale locked himself in his room. The next morning, as he left for school, Dale wouldn’t answer anything Yoder said. In ninety seconds he was out the door.

  Yoder kept dropping things as he dressed. His tie, his toothbrush, his belt. At the office, he couldn’t concentrate. Tiffany peered at him worriedly, her topknot bobbing. Bill Castle phoned. “John! Great news!”

  “Oh?” Yoder said cautiously.

  “We don’t have to worry about wrestling with the union for a Sunday delivery of the cars after all. I don’t have to tell you how complicated they can make things! Instead we’re on for delivery Monday the twenty-ninth, seven a.m. sharp.”

  “But . . . but Monday’s the day the President signs the Clean Air Act—”

  “Not till nine a.m.,” Castle said jovially. “Absolutely reliable inside information. The press will be there. We’ll be safely under the wire.”

  “But you can’t have seven hundred and two cars all delivered to twenty-three U.S. locations by nine Washington time—”

  “No, that’s the beauty of it!” Castle said. “We just get the transfer papers signed at seven! We’ll come to your office, have a notary right there. Clean as cake.”

  “The regulations say physical delivery has to be effected by—”

  “But this is physical delivery!” Castle crowed. “Physical delivery of the contract! Oh, it’ll hold, John, it’ll hold. I checked. Legal is ecstatic.”

  “I have to run this by a few people, Bill,” Yoder said. “It’s not what we’ve agreed to. McConaghie is on the coast today, but I’ll track down his off-site meeting and—”

  “Oh, of course, I know you have to run it by McConaghie. Probably Souder and Foss, too. But they’ll go for it, John. I mean”—Castle’s tone changed—“we really have no choice on this end.”

  Which meant Zircon had no choice either. It was far too late to reopen negotiations with another company. Yoder closed his eyes. McConaghie, the division president, would hold him responsible for this one.

  “Catch you later,” Castle said heartily. “Good talking to you, John.”

  “Tiffany,” Yoder said, “get Mr. McConaghie’s itinerary from Patty and find him for me. Keep trying till you get him. Hold all other calls. No, wait—I’ll take any call from my wife.” He paused. “And from a Diane Harding.”

  But neither one called.

  At noon Yoder went to the McMillan Building. The fat black woman was back behind the counter, doing macramé. In two days she had gotten even fatter. Or maybe, Yoder thought, he himself had shrunk.

  Yoder didn’t introduce himself. “Where is
Diane Harding?”

  “We don’t give out no information like that,” the woman said in her soft, furry voice. Today her muumuu was tie-dyed in pink and orange. Her hair was still in cornrows. The necklaces jangled.

  Yoder said, not raising his voice, “I once taught people like you. An inner-city seventh grade, one hundred percent black. It was 1969 and I was fresh out of college. I thought that the right education could save the world.”

  “And did it?”

  “On my third day, one kid knifed another. During spelling workbook. The fourth week, there was a riot in the classroom. Throwing desks, yanking loose the water fountain, shoving stuff out windows. I resigned.”

  “It be worse now,” the woman said.

  “I know. I mean, I don’t know, but I read about it in the papers. I don’t know what you people need.”

  The woman didn’t answer this. She looked up from her macramé to gaze at Yoder. Her eyes were so sad, so soft, that he was startled. Hadn’t he just insulted her? Hadn’t he just revealed what a gulf he perceived between himself and people like her? Hadn’t he just branded himself a racist, on top of everything else?

  “Not everybody gotta live the same. The bureau ain’t unreasonable,” the woman said softly.

  To which Yoder answered, in the same tone, “Your bureau is ruining my life.”

  “You got no life to ruin, Mr. Yoder. You dead,” she said, her dark eyes liquid with old grief.

  Sarah left a message on the answering machine to say she was spending a few weeks in Chicago with her sister Jane. Dale moved to a friend’s house. He refused to talk to Yoder. “Look, pal,” the friend’s father said when Yoder raced over to their house, “maybe you better let it go for a while. Dale’s pretty upset. He needs some time out, you know?” Yoder didn’t know. The man’s diction, his cheap jeans, the shabby clapboard house with yellow plastic ducks on the lawn, all enraged Yoder, but not as much as the man’s gentle pity. Yoder called his lawyer. The lawyer said Dale was sixteen; he could legally leave home if he chose. There was nothing Yoder could do about it.

  Every night Yoder sat alone, in the dark, drinking. The only phone calls on his answering machine were from the credit-card counseling agency, until one night he lurched in from work, punched on the machine, and heard Diane Harding.