Fictions

by Nancy Kress

  Her left hand moves to my belt. I can’t stand it anymore. Eagerly, I help her undo the buckle.

  While I wait for my son, I watch the people around me at the fair. Those that are here, and a few that are not.

  A tired mother buying hot dogs for her two kids. She probably wants to go home, but if she gets them the hot dogs, she won’t have to bother cooking dinner when she gets there. Striding past her is a carnie, carrying a toolbox. Some ride somewhere is malfunctioning. On the other side of the midway, four teenagers rush up to a balloon-pop, laughing about who will shoot at the balloons first. Then I see that there are only three teenagers. The other one isn’t there. He shimmers faintly at the edges, but a better giveaway are his clothes: wide pants worn not with a baggy tee but with a narrow-collared, button-down shirt and saddle shoes. Fifties, maybe even forties. In all decades, people have died at fairgrounds. And fairgrounds are natural refuges for people on the edge of existence, including the existence of death. At fairgrounds, it’s easy to linger halfway between illusion and reality.

  I really should have remembered all that fifteen years ago, when my son’s father died. If I had remembered, his death would not have happened at a fairground. But I was young myself, although not as young as my son is now. One must forgive the young their inexperience. So often they have no idea where their own best interests lie.

  My son emerges from the Tunnel of Love, his belt still unbuckled, his zipper slightly open. Tch, tch. A woman glances at him in disgust. My son doesn’t notice; he starts to-walk very fast down the midway, and disappears around the corner of the last booth, the Ring-A-Ding Toss.

  I follow, remembering his father’s blue eyes.

  Cathy has to still be here, someplace! We only got six minutes together, maybe even just five . . . She has to still be here! My best bet is to walk the fence, and hope she’s waiting for me someplace there in the dark.

  I see my mother standing in the middle of the midway, and, for a minute, I’m really scared. She’ll put the heaviness on my legs again, on my arms and my back, so that I can’t move except in the way she wants me to . . . but no. Not at a fairground. It’s the only place she can’t put the heaviness on me, and then only if I get there just after sunset. I used to think that was because fairs are so much fun. So different from her horrible world of getting up, going to work, coming home, eating dinner together, watching TV sitting close together on the sofa but not too close because after all she’s my mother, night after night, the endless stupid boring shows I can’t escape from because she puts the heaviness on me, so I have to sit there with her hand sometimes just fondling my hair or patting my thigh or stroking my shoulder like she owns it . . . Night after night . . .

  I used to think she couldn’t put the heaviness on me at a fairground because a fairground is fun and cool and easy and everything else she is not. So I’d go there whenever I could, to escape her, getting out of the house in the little time just after sunset. Then I found Cathy.

  I swerve sharply off the midway, toward the fence, where it’s dark and things are different and my mother can’t follow too close. Where Cathy might be.

  My son was the most beautiful infant in our town. Everyone said so. I was living naturally then, like the others. Why not? I was still pretty, my husband loved me, even though I was so much older than he, and I had the most wonderful baby imaginable.

  But the baby was still nothing to what the man would become. Look at him, rushing off in the darkness like that! Look at his strong back, the movement of his narrow hips, the way his fists clench at his sides, as men do when they’re angry or determined . . . and he is mine. I am his mother. I made his body in my own, and it is mine.

  His father’s hands clenched like that, hanging on to the sides of the falling Ferris wheel. Unreal things, Ferris wheels—or, more accurately, half real. The view is actual enough, and the swaying car. But the motion and the giddy sense of danger are unreal—on a Ferris wheel you are in fact going nowhere, only in circles. And there is no danger, ordinarily. You mustn’t count the one-in-a-million accident, the inexplicable time when a heaviness comes on the machinery and it doesn’t function right. My husband’s hands clutched the side of the car and he cried out his single descending syllable: Nooooooooooo! But it wasn’t his hands that I was after. It was his eyes, those blue blue eyes that had looked at another woman, who sat close beside him as he fell. I don’t know if her hands clutched anything, or if she felt the unnatural slow heaviness of her fall. I didn’t care about her. Only him, and his lying cheating blue blue eyes, that when he hit ground were pierced through by the twisted metal wreckage of the one car that had torn loose and fallen through the dusk.

  It was a very high Ferris wheel.

  But somehow that one act created another twist in the illusionary unreality that fairs always are, and so my son can come here, and do what he does. Or maybe it isn’t that at all. Maybe it’s genetic, as the scientists locked in their own strange reality tell us. He is, after all, my son.

  Mine.

  No man has touched me since his father died. No man ever will. I live only for my son, as devoted mothers always have.

  I find Cathy clear at the far end of the fairground, where the rides and attractions and food stands run out. There’s a fence to separate the butt-end of the midway from some other buildings. The buildings look out of place here: dark, solid, plain. Cathy leans against the fence, as solid herself as I’ve ever seen her, in her long blue dress and clumsy shoes. She holds out her arms and I rush into them.

  Johnny! Oh, Johnny . . .

  Her dress is real thin material, and it’s cool out after sundown, but Cathy feels warm and soft. She always does, no matter what the weather. I kiss her, and kiss her again. Slowly we sink into the rough grass. I lift the blue dress, and she’s solid beneath it, hardly shimmery at all, and when I slide into her she gives a little gasp and holds me tighter, and I don’t see the grass or the midway or the dark low buildings or anything except her.

  But later, lying close together on the ground, I can’t stop looking at those buildings. And Cathy looks, too. She lies heavy in my arms.

  What are they, Johnny? Those buildings?

  I don’t know.

  Then she’s heavier still; her weight almost crushes me. Or maybe

  it’s my own weight. God, no, not here, she can’t reach me here, not at fairgrounds . . .

  A figure moves toward us from the midway.

  At first I think it’s my mother. But the figure is too big, too powerful. My mother is little, shrunken and battered and old . . . The figure is a man. Cathy shrieks and covers her naked thighs with her blue dress. The powerful man stands over us, quiet, and I see that he isn’t looking at us at all, not even at Cathy. He’s looking beyond us, at the dark buildings on the other side of the fence.

  I make my way through the midway crowds and clutter, not hurrying. There’s no point. The fair will close for the night soon enough, and everyone will be sent back where they belong, including my son. Meanwhile, I walk slowly—my back is bothering me again— toward the front gate, watching the whole sad spectacle make itself disappear.

  The man in the French-fry stand empties his vat of grease on the ground, while his daughter wearily cleans and fills the catsup dispensers, thinning the catsup with water.

  The girls from the strip-show straggle from the back of the tent, dressed for the first time tonight, but with thick makeup still caking their faces. Most are nearly middle-aged. None are very pretty.

  The woman running Luck o’ the Irish switches off the lights in her booth, turning her illegally weighted shamrocks from emerald to dull olive.

  A carnie hurries past, carrying his toolbox. But this time I see him clearly, as I did not outside the Tunnel of Love. I see his dated haircut, his excited expression, his clear air of dramatic disaster. I see the shimmer around him. I recognize him, and suddenly I know exactly where he’s rushing to: a bad accident at the Ferris wheel, a fatal accident he will be too
late to do anything about.

  It’s the first time, in all the long summer my son has gone to fairs, that I have seen anyone from that fair.

  I try to run, but I’m old and stiff and can only manage a fast walk. Oh, that bodies wear out! I was young and beautiful and my husband desired me, and now I cannot run to claim him, although he is and always will be mine. My son, my son . . .

  He’s somewhere along this fence, with his illusions. I plunge off the midway and grope my way along the wire, searching in the darkness.

  If I am too late, I swear I will find a way to put his eyes out yet again.

  “Who are you?” I say to the figure. He doesn’t answer, and then I get mad. The pervert, just wanting to watch while Cathy and me . . . I get to my feet and pull her up with me. If he wants a fight, tough shit. He’s not going to get it, unless he tries to touch Cathy. If he dares to touch her . . . But he’s three inches taller than I am, and maybe twenty pounds heavier.

  Come on, Cathy.

  No.

  It’s not Cathy’s thoughts. It’s his. He moves closer, and puts a hand on my arm, and the minute he does, I see the faint shimmer around him, and I stop stone-dead still.

  No.

  “Who are you?” I yell.

  But it’s like he can’t say anything else. He shakes his head, and I see his eyes. Only they aren’t there, just empty sockets, creepy as hell. He points to the low buildings. Cathy’s warm hand tightens on mine.

  Johnny—he wants us to go there.

  Why? They’re closed.

  The man points hard. His whole body leans into pointing. Then he suddenly spins around, and by the dim light from the Tilt-A-Whirl I see my mother coming toward us across the dark grass.

  The man throws up his arms to cover the place where his eyes should be. Then he falls forward—a weird, slow-motion fall, like he’s terrified of the little drop to the grass, and I hear him in my head: Noooooooooooooo . . . By the time his body hits ground, it’s disappeared.

  I grab at the fence and start climbing. I don’t think about it, I just do it, pulling Cathy after me. I hear her dress tear on the fence, but I don’t stop. The fence is only about six feet high, and isn’t topped with any spikes or anything. I get over it and turn to help Cathy, and I see that it wasn’t the fence that tore her blue dress, it was my mother, who’s got hold of the thin material in one hand and Cathy’s long hair in the other. My mother pulls viciously, and I climb back up on the fence and kick her in the face. She screams and falls backward, and I yank Cathy so hard her left breast scrapes on the wire, and Cathy screams, too. Blood smears my hand. I pull harder, and Cathy’s over the fence, gasping and naked and bleeding. Her shoes are gone. I run, dragging her with me.

  Johnny . . .

  Come on!

  She can hardly move, but I make her keep going. The buildings are pulling me now . . . No, that’s not right. Something is pushing me toward them, from behind. Somehow, without words, I know it’s the blind shimmery man that my mother made disappear.

  We reach the first of the buildings and collapse against them, panting hard. The air smells bad. Cathy starts to cry. I take her in my arms and hold her.

  “It’s all right, Cathy. It’s all right, love. We’re here now.”

  “Oh, Johnny, I was . . . so scared!”

  The words aren’t in my head. I hear them with my ears. And Cathy is all the way solid in my arms, no shimmer at all, a cold shivering body sobbing naked against me, more real than anything else in the whole world.

  He accomplished it! The lying son of a bitch actually accomplished it, the first real chance he got . . . Why does he hate me so much? All I did was love him, marry him, birth a son by him!

  I lie on the ground where I fell when my son kicked me. My jaw is broken, I think, although there is surprisingly little pain. I need help: a doctor, an ambulance. I need my son.

  Who has escaped, although he probably doesn’t know it. Escaped into the exhibition buildings. Homemade jams and jellies. Pickled beets. Quilts, patiently sewn by hand over months and months. Prize pigs and heifers and sheep, the result of years of mundane, earthy, real tasks. Feeding, cleaning, sewing, cooking, growing . . . things that have as little to do with the pathetic illusions of the midway as with the tawdry flickering of TV. Gardening, measuring, making, preserving, feeding. What is in the exhibition halls of a fair are the only real things in it.

  I had always been so glad that my son came to the fairgrounds at dusk, when the exhibition halls had already closed! I had counted on it. And now . . .

  The pain comes, then, but not in my jaw. My son, my son . . . I forgive you. You didn’t know what you were doing. And you are mine. My blood, my bone, my flesh. Mine.

  “Ma’am? My God, ma’am, are you all right? Hey, Jack, over here, a lady’s hurt!”

  I can’t bear for these men to touch me. But I will have to bear it, at least until they’ve set my broken jaw. No longer than that. No man should touch me except my son.

  The air smells bad because there are pigs inside this building. It must be where the farmers show off their . . . whatever they show off. I never cared a rat’s ass about all this stuff. Only . . . Cathy can talk to me here, right out loud. She can get chilled. She can bleed. Here, we are the same.

  I throw my body against the door and pretty soon the hinges give way. I’m strong. Inside, I turn on a single light. It’s pigs, all right. On the closest wall, a covered tunnel leads to another building. In the dim light, I see jars of food.

  I find clean water, and wash the blood off Cathy. The gash on her breast isn’t deep. I give her my jacket, until I can find something better. Then I make us a bed of clean straw and switch off the light.

  After a while, I get up and set the door so it isn’t obvious that the hinges were broken.

  Cathy cuddles in the straw beside me, warm now, and eager. My hands explore her. I whisper, “In the morning, Cathy, we’ll leave before these buildings open. We can buy food—I’ve got money with me.” She nods. I think hard, trying to plan.

  We can do it. I know we can. And when the fair moves on, we’ll go with it. Until we find another. And another. All with pigs and jellies and stuff.

  I whisper, “We’ll stay in these buildings as much as possible, because here you’re . . .”

  “I’m Cathy,” she says simply, and reaches for my belt buckle.

  For the first time in my life, I believe that my mother doesn’t know where I am.

  My son is in the exhibition hall, behind the pigs. I know that, even though I lie in the back of a speeding ambulance. Damn him! But the fair is over Saturday, and I will be out of the hospital well before that. It won’t be as easy for him to do as my son thinks that it will. He is so young. Too young to know that she and her reality will never possess him, because I already do. For better or worse, in sickness and health, body and soul, until the day he dies. No matter what any man thinks, there is nothing stronger in him than the reality his mother has put there.

  But I won’t ever tell him that, in so many words. Most people cannot bear very much truth. We who love them must keep the truth from them.

  I do.

  STEAMSHIP SOLDIER ON THE INFORMATION FRONT

  Just before the plane touched down at Logan, Allan Haller gave one last check to the PID on the back of his tie-tack. Good. Intense vibration in the Cathy Aw icon, superintense in Suzette, and even Charlie showed acceptable oscillation. No need to contact any of them, that would save time. Patti and Jon, too their icons shivered and thrilled at nearly top speed. And three minutes till landing.

  “My, look at what you have there,” said his seatmate pleasantly. A well rounded grandmotherly sort, she’d been trying to engage him in conversation since La Guardia. “What sort of gadget is that, might I ask?”

  No, Allan almost said, because what ground could possibly be gained? But then he looked at her again. Expensive jacket, good haircut, Gucci bag. Certainly money, but probably not entrepreneurial-rich old women tended t
o safe and stodgy investments. Still, what could he lose? Two and a half minutes until landing, and speculative capital, as he well knew, was sometimes found in very odd places.

  “It’s a PID-A personal-icon display,” he said to Grandma Money. “It shows the level of electronic interaction going on with my family-my wife Cathy here, my son and daughter on these two icons-and two of my chief business associates. Each of them is wired with a WIPE, a ‘weak interactive personal electronic field,’ in various items of clothing that communicate with each other through a faint current sent through their bodies. Then all interactions with other electronic fields in their vicinity are registered in their WIPES and sent wireless to each other’s PIDS. I can tell, for instance, by how much the Cathy icon is vibrating that she’s probably working at her terminal-lots of data going through her icon. Suzette is probably playing tennis-see, her icon is superoscillating the way WIPE fields do when they’re experiencing fast-motion physical interference, and Charlie here—”

  “You send electric current through your children’s bodies?” Grandma Money sounded horrified.

  “It isn’t dange—”

  “All the time? And then you Big-Brother them? All the time?”

  Allan flipped down the tie-tack. Well, it had been worth a skirmish, as long as the time talking to her would have been downtime anyway. With a slight bump, the plane made contact with the runway.

  “Don’t they . . . well, I don’t mean to be rude, but doesn’t your family object to-” But Allan was already moving down the aisle toward the jetway, from the forward seat he’d had booked precisely because it was the first to disembark. By the time the other passengers were reaching for their overhead luggage, he was already in the airport, moving fast, talking into his phone.

  “Jon, what have you got?”

  “A third prospect. Out in Newton; the car company will do the max-efficient route. The company is Figgy Pudding, the product is Newssort. It goes through the whole Net looking for matches to key words, then compares the news items with ones the user has liked in the past and preselects for him-the usual statistical-algorithm gig. But they’re claiming 93 percent success rate.”