Fictions

by Nancy Kress

  The alien vanishes. Then the building vanishes. It’s not yet dawn outside, but Jenny hears a siren in the distance, drawing closer. Somewhere in the field a car door slams. She sets Ricky down and tugs at him to walk toward Carleen’s camp. The siren comes closer still; Eric and his work crew won’t need those tunnels now. Jenny can go to Dundee as soon as Bob arrives for her. He may be on his way now.

  Ricky tries to break free but Jenny holds him firmly. He isn’t going to get hit by another car, not while he’s with her. She has no idea what the future holds for Ricky, for any of them. But now—finally!—hatred of the self-righteous aliens, blithely playing Old Testament God, burns stronger in her than does despair over Eric. “It justifies our decision” . . . The hell it does! All those innocent lives, all the grief tearing apart the survivors . . .

  Hatred is a great heartener. Hatred, and the knowledge that she is going to be needed (“It’s chaotic out there just now . . .”), as Carleen and Ricky had needed her. These things, hatred and usefulness, aren’t much (“—even if you’re no happier—”) but they’re something. And both are easier than love.

  She brings the child back to his grandmother as the camp wakes and the cars drive in.

  ELEVATOR

  When visiting hours ended, Ian got on the hospital elevator on the fifth floor. Throat tight and stomach roiling, he didn’t notice the “up” arrow until the doors started to close. Ian was going down, but he had no energy left to move. Marcia had, once again, drained it all.

  “Hold the elevator!” a voice cried, and a fat man already in the car blocked the sliding door. His fingers looked like an uncut bunch of bananas. A middle-aged woman pushed into the elevator, scowling at nothing. As the car rose, her foot jiggled impatiently against the floor—tap tap tap tap—and the other occupant, a sullen teenage girl in robe and hospital slippers, glared at her.

  “Slow jobbie, isn’t it?” said the fat man, grinning. “Guess that’s why we all are going up two floors to go down! Better than waiting for the next one!” No one answered.

  On the sixth floor, a nurse in blue scrubs pushed a wheel chair onto the elevator. The woman in the wheelchair looked older than rocks. Scraggly white hair, face as crevassed as the Dakota Badlands, thin, wrinkled lips muttering to herself. The nurse maneuvered the chair to the back wall, facing her charge outward. Everyone shifted to accommodate this. The old woman smelled like sour apples. The elevator creaked to the seventh floor, where luxurious—for a hospital, anyway—private rooms adjoined a this-floor-only solarium. Ian had sneaked Marcia up here during one of her previous stays, hoping the sunlight and greenery would help. But nothing helped.

  A gray-haired man strode into the car and the others immediately, instinctively, backed away to give him room. European-cut suit, manicured fingernails, briefcase of hand-sewn leather. Ian had seen this guy somewhere before, or a picture of him.

  They started down. Everyone stared raptly at the changing numbers on the lighted display. The old woman muttered and chuckled. Between floors four and three, the elevator shuddered, stopped, and gave a violent lurch against the walls of the shaft. The teenage girl shrieked.

  Ian was thrown against the middle-aged woman, who reeked of stale cigarette smoke. He grabbed the handrail, hauled himself off her, and got to his feet. The fat man yelled, “Hey! Everybody all right?”

  The woman scowled at Ian as if he’d deliberately assaulted her. The man with the briefcase righted himself. The sleeve of his jacket rode up slightly and Ian caught the flash of onyx cufflinks. The fat man said, “Don’t panic, folks! Everybody’s fine, that’s a mercy for sure, and this is just a little technical excitement from the Otis people, ha ha! Fixed in a jiffy!” He pressed the EMERGENCY button on the control panel.

  Nothing happened.

  The middle-aged woman shrilled, “Aren’t alarms supposed to sound? Or something?”

  “Alarm silent as the grave,” the fat man said. Pointlessly, he winked. The gray-haired man, whom Ian now thought of as “the CEO,” took a cell phone from his briefcase and frowned. Ian, looking over his shoulder, saw that the cell was either off or dead.

  “Oh, hell, I got it,” said the woman. She pulled a cell from her purse and keyed in the emergency number pasted onto the elevator wall. Ian heard the faint tinny ring go on and on. She said, “What kind of fucking elevator company don’t answer their own emergency line?”

  The fat man said, “Now, now, ma’am—let’s watch our language in front of kids!” The woman glared at him and the teenage girl rolled her eyes.

  Ian took out his cell and called 911. The woman continued to punch numbers onto her keypad, each jab an assault from blood-red fingernails. All her numbers were busy. So was Ian’s call.

  911 was busy? Not that Ian had good memories of 911. It had taken them seventeen minutes to reach Marcia, this last time.

  The old woman in the wheelchair suddenly raised her head and laughed like a hyena.

  The fat man said cheerfully, “Still nothing to worry about, folks. Busy time at the hospital, practically Times Square out there! When people see the ol’ car isn’t moving, somebody’ll report it and we’ll be outta here in no time. Meanwhile, since we’re all gonna be friendly for a while, what d’ya say we introduce ourselves?”

  No one responded. Seven people, even with the wheelchair, didn’t crowd an elevator designed to hold a hospital bed, but Ian felt crowded nonetheless. The smell of old smoke from the shrill woman scraped at the inside of his nostrils.

  “Then I’ll just get the ball rolling here! I’m Carl Townes, tour bus guide extraordinaire, tour the town with Townes, see Carrolton with Carl, a laugh every quarter mile!”

  “Oh God,” said the smoker.

  “And who are you, little lady?” Carl said to the teenager. She was very pale, with thin cheeks, watery blue eyes, and long, brittle hair. Her bathrobe looked suitable for a monk: brown, floor-length, voluminous. She turned her back to Carl, who was not deterred.

  “Little lady’s shy. How about you, ma’am, what’s your name? I’ll bet it’s Linda. You look like a Linda.”

  “Just leave me out of this, okay?” Her foot resumed jiggling: tap tap tap tap.

  Ian felt sorry for Carl. The poor guy had struck out twice. It felt good to feel sorry for somebody besides himself. He said, “I’m Ian.”

  “Ian!” Carl said, as if they’d been buddies since the fourth grade.

  The old woman in the wheelchair said abruptly, “Cindy.”

  The smoker stopped tapping her foot and stared. “How’d she know my—”

  The nurse said gently, “Cindy is her name, too. Quite a coincidence, actually.” She had a faint British accent.

  “Yeah, whatever,” Cindy Smoker said. Tap tap tap tap.

  “Carl, Ian, two Cindys,” Carl said happily. “And you, Nurse . . .?”

  “Gabriella.” Ian looked at her closely for the first time. Average height, build, coloring, a woman you might have passed a dozen times without recognizing her. But her voice was soft, her smile sweet, and all at once lust took him in a dark wave. How long had it been? Years. And Gabriella seemed nothing like Marcia.

  Carl said, “Well, I guess that brings us back to you, little lady. Wanna try Take Two? Have a little mercy on us and give up your name.”

  The girl pursed dry lips resentfully but surrendered to pressure. “Jessica.”

  “Great! Fantastic! And you, sir?”

  Everyone looked sideways at the CEO, and for some reason Ian found himself holding his breath. The man radiated power, even danger, although it would be hard to say why. He didn’t speak, and his contempt drenched them all in bile before he looked away and dismissed them—plus the elevator, the building, the situation—leaving only him in the universe. Dislike bloomed in Ian, who so seldom allowed himself to dislike anyone.

  “Sir?” Carl insisted. Either Carl had a hide like a rhinoceros or his senses had been dulled by too much forced, tour-guide jollity.

  Unexpectedly, Cindy Smo
ker rasped, “Don’t you recognize him, Carl? That there’s Mr. Thomas J. Bascomb. Himself, in the flesh.”

  Of course it was. That was where Ian had seen him: on the cover of Time, Forbes, the Wall Street Journal. Thomas J. Bascomb, CEO (he’d been right!) of Bascomb Financial Services, Manhattan. Billionaire under indictment in a corruption scandal so complex and esoteric that Ian had understood none of it except that a lot of ordinary people had lost their life savings. What was Bascomb doing in a hospital in Carrolton, Pennsylvania?

  The elevator’s lights blinked, went off, came back on.

  “Fuck it to hell!” said Cindy Smoker. She tried six numbers in rapid succession on her cell. All six were busy. So were the three Ian tried, including 911. How was that possible? Bascomb’s cell, a fancy satellite-looking job, was still dead. Apparently Carl, the nurse, and the two patients didn’t possess phones.

  Upstairs they’d taken away Marcia’s cell, her belt, her shoe laces.

  Carl said, “Well, now, seems like there might be some temporary—” Jessica fainted.

  Ian saw it a second before the girl went down. Her pale face grew paler, all the way to the kind of white Ian associated with polar bears and printing paper. Her eyes rolled back in her head and she slumped sideways, not clutching at anything to break her fall, an unimpeded and almost graceful drop onto Carl, who caught her. One sleeve of her robe fell back, just as Bascomb’s jacket sleeve had earlier, exposing her arm. Shock jolted through Ian. Jessica’s arm was thin as a broomstick. The sharp bones in her wrist stuck out in knobs.

  “Why . . . why . . .” Carl stammered, “she doesn’t weigh anything!” He laid her on the elevator floor, puffing with the exertion of lowering his bulk, not hers. “Give her air, folks!”

  Jessica’s eyes opened. She struggled to sit, couldn’t, and fell back to the floor. Carl yanked off his sweatshirt, exposing a faded red tee that said CARROLTON TOURS, and wadded the sweatshirt under Jessica’s head. Her pale, dry hair lay limply on the nylon. Carl said to Gabriella, “Nurse, what should we do?”

  “Nothing,” Gabriella said tranquilly.

  Nothing? But then Ian could see her point. Jessica was clearly anorexic, and the only thing that would help was food, which she undoubtedly would refuse even if anyone had any to offer. “You always see everybody’s point,” Marcia had raged at him upstairs, “except mine!” But it seemed to Ian that he did nothing except see Marcia’s point of view, over and over, in the endless arguments in which she attacked and he appeased. Those arguments that went on for days, weeks, mounting in tension and unbearability until Marcia in one masterful stroke made everything Ian’s fault by ending up yet again in Carrolton General.

  From the floor Jessica murmured, without heat, “Leave me alone.” Bascomb gazed down at the girl as at a dead fish. Ian’s dislike grew.

  All at once Ancient Cindy laughed, the same grating bray, and said, “Let her go!”

  Nurse Gabriella smiled gently and said nothing.

  Cindy Smoker scowled. “ ‘Let her go’ ? Nobody’s bothering her!”

  “Let her go,” Ancient Cindy repeated, cackling. “You can’t help her.”

  “You mean, like, let her die?” Cindy Smoker demanded. “What kinda heartless bitch are you, you old hag?”

  Ian was appalled. Carl said, “Why . . . why . . .” Bascomb’s nostrils wrinkled in disgust. But the nurse just gave her gentle smile.

  Carl, recovering, said in a low voice to Cindy Smoker, “The old lady probably doesn’t mean anything by it. I think all her cylinders aren’t firing right, if you get my meaning.” With one plump finger he made a circle in the air beside his head.

  “Whatever,” Cindy Smoker said. Abruptly she pounded on the elevator walls. “Hey, anybody! Can you hear us? Hey!”

  She pounded and yelled, stopping every so often to listen for a reply that didn’t come, until Carl said genially, “Walls must be too well insulated. And all that banging is pretty hard on us in here.”

  Ian agreed, although he didn’t say so aloud. The pounding seemed to echo in his head. Cindy threw Carl a look that could wither cacti, reached into a pocket and pulled out a pack of Parliaments.

  “No smoking in here, I’m sorry,” Carl said with sudden authority.

  “Jesus Christ,” Cindy said, but she put away the cigarettes.

  Ian tried 911 again. It was busy. He tried Information, his own number at work, Tim’s number in the next cubicle, his mother in Pittsburgh. All busy.

  “Let her go,” Ancient Cindy crooned, so that it was almost a song.

  Two hours passed, mostly in silence except for periodic, but mercifully shorter, pounding on the wall from Cindy. Carl had tried boisterous conversation and then, incredibly, a group sing. No one cooperated. They all sat with their backs to elevator walls, even Bascomb, who put his briefcase between his expensively tailored butt and the grubby floor. Jessica, stretched out full length, slept.

  Ian dozed. He hadn’t been sleeping well most nights, even though it was a shameful relief to have the bed to himself. But in two days Marcia would come home and it would all start again—

  “Fuck it all, where are they?” Cindy Smoker burst out, waking him. She yanked out the Parliaments and this time she lit one, fingers trembling with need on her Zippo. The quick acrid odor of tobacco swelled into the car. Carl reached toward the cigarette and she yanked it away, dropped the lighter, and punched him on the arm. “Let me be!”

  “You can’t smoke in here,” Carl said. His voice had hardened but his smile stayed wide. “Too dangerous for everybody, Cindy.”

  “This isn’t your fucking tour bus!”

  Carl reached again for the cigarette. He outweighed her by at least a hundred pounds but Ian would have given odds on Cindy. She suddenly reminded him of Marcia, even though they looked nothing alike. But he recognized that substrate of perpetual fury, that eagerness to let the molten anger surge up no matter who stood on the ground above. Ian felt his spine press into the wall.

  Carl said evenly, “Give me that cigarette.”

  “Go fuck yourself!” She pulled it farther away and he lunged forward. The cigarette went out.

  Ian blinked. The tip of the Parliament had been glowing redly, strongly. Neither Carl nor Cindy had touched it. There was no breeze in the elevator.

  Cindy stared at her dead cigarette, and Carl took the moment to grab the pack and shove it into the pocket of his jeans, where it made a misshapen lump.

  “Fuck!” Cindy yelled. Jessica, on the floor, opened her eyes and smiled.

  Bascomb spoke for the first time. “Will you all please be quiet?”

  Immediately both Cindy and Carl turned their attention to him. Before either could speak, Ancient Cindy said from her wheelchair, “You need to die.”

  Bascomb’s head swiveled slowly toward her.

  “He will recover. He knows everything. You need to die.”

  Bascomb said to Gabriella, “Shut her up.”

  “She’s very old,” the nurse said with her gentle smile. “She babbles sometimes, wandering in time. But it’s harmless.”

  “The gun is loaded,” Ancient Cindy said. “The rope is tied. The car goes fast. The pills are in the medicine chest. Kyrie eleison, kyrie, kyrie. He knows everything.”

  The muscles in Bascomb’s throat tightened until they stood out in long, corded bundles. For an endless moment, tension prickled in the air like heat. Ian couldn’t stand it, never could. Always he had to be the one to defuse tension, avoid confrontation, calm Marcia down. . . . He said desperately to Carl, “Were you visiting someone in the hospital? During visiting hours, I mean?”

  Carl turned to him gratefully. “My son. Car accident but nobody got hurt, thank God. A mercy. How about you?”

  Ian should have foreseen this. Of course Carl would turn the question back to him. His stomach spasmed. “My wife. But she’ll be all right, too.”

  “Oh, wonderful,” Carl said. “And you, Cindy, you visiting kin?”

  Cindy Smoker,
still holding the unlit cigarette in her red talons, refused the conciliatory gesture. “Leave me the fuck out of this.”

  Ancient Cindy crooned, “Sister sister sister oh you kid!”

  Cindy Smoker stared. Ian found he was holding his breath.

  “But I kisssssss-ed her little sister and forgot my Clementine!” the old woman sang in a voice cracked and out-of-tune. “O my darlin’—but you made it this far, sister. No smoke means no fire.”

  “Shut her up!” Cindy Smoker said, unwittingly echoing Bascomb. She started to get to her feet and Carl put out a meaty arm, but all at once the crone looked down at Jessica, said quietly, “Eat, child,” and closed her eyes. Within ten seconds she was snoring.

  Cindy Smoker lashed out at all of them, none of them, the world. “I’ll never forgive my sister no never I don’t give a flying fart what Mama says even on her so-called deathbed—never—you hear me—Christ, I want a cigarette—how the fuck did she know?”

  “She just babbles,” Gabriella said. “She’s very old and worn out and she babbles.”

  Another hour passed. Carl announced, shamefaced, that he had to piss. He slipped his sweatshirt from under Jessica’s head, replacing it with the sweater Ian offered. Jessica didn’t stir. Carl wadded the sweatshirt into a ball, stuck it in a corner of the elevator and turned his back. The thick cotton absorbed the liquid if not the odor.

  Ian’s cell was still busy on all numbers, all the time. Ancient Cindy slumped in her wheelchair. Gabriella leaned against her, eyes closed. Cindy Smoker snored. Jessica slept soundlessly, stretched full length on the floor, pale as a corpse. Every once in a while Ian leaned close to make sure she was still breathing.

  Another hour. Two. Bascomb slept sitting up, his head thrown back against the wall, twitching and groaning. Ian, despite embarrassment, availed himself of Carl’s sweatshirt. He tried to be quiet about it. As he returned to his place, Cindy Smoker woke up and immediately exploded, as if her curses were merely an extension of her dreams.