Fictions

by Nancy Kress

  “Christ, they’re patients!” she said, waving at Jessica and Ancient Cindy. “How come nobody’s missing them? What the fuck is wrong with this fucking place? What time is it, Ian?”

  “Seventeen after midnight.”

  “Christ!” She stood up, took a step, sat back down again. There was no place to pace. Ian saw that she still, after all these hours, clutched the cigarette that had gone out by itself. Her foot began to drum: tap tap tap tap.

  “Don’t wake the others,” Carl said wearily. Maybe it was the weariness, as if Carl’s usual frantic good-will had all flaked off like so much old paint, that got to Cindy. She stopped tapping, pulled hard at the skin on her face, and said to Carl, “You sure your son’s going to be okay?”

  “Right as rain,” Ancient Cindy suddenly said from her corner. “Rain, rain, go away—they all come again another day, you know, all of them. Cops can’t stop the rain, won’t, don’t need to. Sunshine tomorrow, fair and warmer, high pressure system moving in!”

  Cindy Smoker stared at Carl’s face. She said slowly, as if the words belonged to somebody else and she was surprised they were coming out of her own mouth, “Your kid in trouble with the cops? Is that his room down on Four with the police guard on it?”

  Carl said, his smile back and wide as ever, “Oh, no, nothing big. A misunderstanding. You know how kids are, but Petey’ll be all right. He’ll be just fine.” His lower lip trembled.

  “Right as rain,” Ancient Cindy sang. “Rain, rain, go away—”

  Ian inched forward so he could look past Carl directly at the old woman. “Who are you?”

  But she gazed past him, toward the sleeping Thomas Bascomb, and her sunken eyes glittered with an emotion that Ian couldn’t name.

  “She’s mostly blind,” Gabriella said to Ian. They were the only two awake. “Frequently when one sense is lost, others sharpen in compensation. So, yes, I can believe that Cindy can sense your friend’s anger.”

  Cindy Smoker was not Ian’s friend, but he didn’t correct Gabriella. Ian had only the normal five senses. He hadn’t smelled Marcia’s desperation, hadn’t even smelled the blood until he’d gone through the bedroom and pushed open the bathroom door left ajar. In the tub, this time, his wife’s naked body motionless in a sea of red, red, red. And his first thought had been, Maybe this time she meant it.

  The thought horrified him, with a horror that sank into all the moments that followed as he called 911, woke Marcia from her stupor-like sleep, followed the ambulance to Carrolton General, filled out the papers for psychiatric observation. But Marcia hadn’t meant it. She’d lived, as she’d lived every other time, and so this suicide attempt joined the others as fresh testament to her unhappiness. To Ian’s inadequacy as a husband. To the fragility that tied him to her with bonds of pity and guilt and the baseness of his own fervent desire to leave this woman who gave him nothing but who needed him so much that she attempted suicide every time he brought up divorce.

  In the elevator, 911 was still busy.

  Bascomb suddenly flailed at the air, screamed, “No no no!” and woke up himself and everybody else except Jessica.

  He glared at them all, as if they and not he were the source of his nightmare. Cindy Smoker flipped him the finger. Ancient Cindy, eyes still closed, said, “Let her go.”

  Ian’s throat tightened. He grabbed for Jessica’s wrist and felt for a pulse. Her eyes flew open and she glared at him. She was alive. Gladness flooded him, even as he wondered why. He was never going to see any of these people again once he got off this elevator.

  Ancient Cindy said, “You made it this far, sister! No fire, no smoke.” Then, after a pause, “Time to die. Have mercy on our souls.”

  No one answered her.

  The elevator rumbled and started to move.

  “Fuck!” Cindy Smoker cried, in delight and fear. Ian had been asleep, dreaming in confused images about which he was sure only that they’d been bad. He got to his feet. The car had stopped between the third and fourth floors—if the thing just plunged straight down the shaft, was that survivable?

  The elevator didn’t plunge. It moved slowly down, everyone staring at the number display, until it reached “1.” Ancient Cindy said clearly, in a voice stronger and much younger than before, “Let her go.” She was staring directly at Ian.

  The elevator door opened.

  Only when fresh air from the lobby wafted in did Ian realize how foul the elevator had become, reeking of piss and smoke and sweat and old flesh. Carl helped Jessica to her feet. The girl seemed stronger; she said, wonderingly, “I’m hungry.” Cindy Smoker still held the unlighted Parliament between two fingers. Ian saw her drop it on the elevator floor and grind it underneath her shoe.

  It was early morning. People in the lobby turned in amazement as the seven captives staggered out of the car. Ian didn’t wait to find out what had happened, why no one had rescued them, how a non-working elevator could have been not noticed for ten hours. He wanted to go home. He wanted to go home now, and he wanted it with the unreasoning passion of a six-year-old who has run too much, too long, too hard.

  When he woke in his own bed, it was two in the afternoon. Ian showered and dressed, his mind clearer than it had been in days. Weeks. Years.

  He turned on the local news station. The elevator break-down wasn’t there. A solemn anchorwoman with perfect hair intoned, “—found just over an hour ago. Cause of death was allegedly a single, self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head. Bascomb, under indictment for his allegedly leading role in the burgeoning financial scandal, faced almost certain imprisonment for—”

  Ian stood very still.

  “—chief witness Daniel Davis, at present recovering from a heart attack sustained while on vacation in Pennsylvania—”

  “He knows everything.”

  The rest of the news, whatever it was, washed over Ian unheard.

  “Let her go,” the old woman said, but she hadn’t meant Jessica. Jessica had looked stronger after her long, restorative sleep; she’d said she was hungry. Cindy had crushed her cigarette and maybe—maybe—hadn’t lit another: “You made it this far, sister. No smoke means no fire.” And to Carl, his anguish over his son masked by all that forced heartiness: “Right as rain. . . they all come again another fine day. . . cops can’t stop the rain.”

  But to Bascomb: “Best to die.”

  Ian walked to his garage. At the hospital, which he had no recollection of driving to, he took the stairs to the fourth floor and stopped a nurse. “Which room is Peter Townes’s?”

  “Four sixty-two, first corridor on your left.” She pointed.

  No police guard stood in front of 462. Ian went in and said, “Peter Townes?”

  “Yeah, who wants to know?” A surly teenager with Carl’s round face and chunky body.

  “I’m a legal advocate with—”

  “The charges got dropped. I don’t need any more legal shit.”

  “Glad to hear it.” The words came out thick, uncertain.

  He walked up a flight of steps. But on the landing, hand on the heavy fire door that led to Marcia’s floor, Ian stopped. His eyes closed.

  All the rest of his life. Tension and arguing and coldness and these suicide attempts. Unless maybe, finally, years from now, one of the attempts succeeded, long after Ian was as completely destroyed as Marcia already was. Two people going down instead of one.

  “You need to die,” Cindy said. But not to him.

  Carefully, as if his bones were spun glass, he walked down to the first floor. Gabriella walked by, carrying a stack of blankets. She wore fresh pink scrubs.

  “Nurse! Nurse!”

  She turned toward him, smiling serenely. “Yes?”

  “That old woman—Cindy—what is she?”

  Her smile didn’t waver. “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “Don’t know? I mean last night—the elevator—your patient—”

  “I work in Pediatrics. And I wasn’t on duty last night.”

&nb
sp; He gaped at her. She turned to leave.

  “Wait, wait! You can’t just—I need—”

  Something moved behind her eyes, some kindness mingled with amusement. She said in the same soft voice as last night, “You people have it wrong, you know. Mercy is strained, difficult, hard. Always. Or it’s not really mercy.”

  “But—”

  “I’m sorry, I’m late. Please excuse me.”

  “But Cindy—”

  She turned and walked away.

  “Let her go.” Said to him, to Ian, and not about Jessica Said by a babbling half-mad crone, by an alien or an angel of mercy or a whatever-the-hell-she-was. Said to him.

  In the lobby, a volunteer at the Information Desk loaned him a phone book. He found the listings for ATTORNEYS—DIVORCE, even as he wondered if he had the strength, after all, for mercy. For himself, and maybe even for Marcia as well.

  He chose a number and keyed it in. His cell phone worked perfectly.

  2009

  UNINTENDED BEHAVIOR

  Nancy Kress’s latest book is the bio-thriller, Dogs (Tachyon Press). Her newest story, too, concerns a dog, as do two novellas she published last year. If s difficult to account for this sudden spurt of fascination with canines. However, the term “unintended behavior” is not zoological. The phrase is tech-speak: It refers to program code doing something the programmer didn’t foresee. Nancy tells us that the only way she, not a tech sophisticate, knows this is because her son told her so.

  After thirty-six years of miserable marriage, Annie Skepford made the discovery that decided her on leaving her husband. But the truth, when she finally admitted it to herself, was that the girl on the phone was almost irrelevant; Annie had just had enough. Thirty-six years! But at least at this late date, a separation wouldn’t matter much to Carol, married and living on the other coast, or to Joel, a grad student at a college the farthest away from home that he could get himself accepted. To Annie’s surprise, it was the dog who objected to a divorce.

  “No,” Beowulf said. He had only worn the animal-speaking thingie for a few weeks and Annie still wasn’t used to it. She never would have bought it for him. But Don was a technophile and an early adopter of every weird gadget on the Net. Their fourth-floor apartment was networked, localized, and MEMS-ed, although Annie wasn’t sure what that meant. Don never explained. He only rolled his eyes and said, “Networking is the most powerful tool of this century. Don’t you ever read anything?”

  “What did you say?” Annie asked Beowulf. An instant later she felt like a fool. She had read the package insert that came with Beowulf’s thingie, which said that the ridiculous little helmet atop his head scanned Wulf’s brain waves. The scan identified both his emotional state and those “cognition areas” that were showing greatest blood flow at any moment. The helmet then produced pre-recorded audio of what a dog might say if it could, in your personal choice of fifty-six voices. Wulf “spoke” in a light, musical tenor, which Annie thought ridiculous for a Borzoi the size of a small armchair.

  “No,” Wulf repeated.

  “No what?” She couldn’t believe she was doing this. Having a conversation with a dog.

  “No,” Wulf repeated, looked away from her at a pigeon on the apartment window sill, returned his brown-eyed gaze to her. Wulf had a small head set proudly on his powerful, graceful hound body, and an aloof and aristocratic air that could intimidate Annie even before he could “speak.” Borzoi were inextricably linked with Russian royalty. Annie, by contrast, felt dumpy and weak and old, sitting with her balled-up handkerchief in a faded swivel rocker, her eyes swollen and achy from crying.

  Probably Wulf meant “No, don’t cry.” Dogs could pick up on human distress. Or maybe he meant “No, don’t neglect my walk,” which it was now time for. Or even “No, don’t change routine”—hadn’t she read an article someplace about dogs that could detect minute changes in human pheromones, and so tell when their owners were about to have seizures?

  Annie had decided on a life-changing seizure. Except that she wasn’t sure how to go about it. How would she live? Don had always earned all the money, budgeted all the money, controlled all the money. They didn’t even have a joint bank account, much less credit cards in her own name and . . .

  “Annie!” Don’s voice called. She grimaced, hid her handkerchief in her palm, and swiveled her chair to face the TV. Don had rigged it up to the computer in his study, with some sort of cameras that showed his face when he called. He called several times each day.

  “Did you pick up my gray suit at the cleaner’s?”

  “Not yet, Don.”

  “No?” His eyebrows rose. “Why not? What on Earth were you doing with yourself all morning? And why are you crying?”

  Now. She could do it now. Just say the words outright: I’m leaving you. I can’t stand this life anymore. You treat me like a child, or a machine. I’m out of here.

  She couldn’t do it.

  “I’m not crying.”

  He gave a sigh of impatience masquerading as patience. “Right. Whatever you say, Annie. But make sure to pick up my suit, and get a case of Guinness. My poker club is coming over tomorrow night. Or did you forget that, too?”

  “No, Don.”

  “Good.” His face vanished from the screen.

  Annie started crying again. She said to Wulf, “I have to get out of here!”

  “No,” Wulf said, and this time there was a shade more firmness to “his” voice. Was he on Don’s side, then? Don had bought him and Don disciplined him. But it was Annie who fed Wulf, walked him, took him to the vet, brushed him, talked to him. She said to the dog, “You don’t understand.”

  “No,” Wulf said, which could have meant anything.

  He became more chatty on their walk. Annie took him to the dry cleaner’s and the grocery store, staggering home with the gray suit over one shoulder and a case of Guinness on the other. Wulf offered “I want to chase that cat” and “That woman is afraid of me” and several repetitions of “This smells interesting!” He wagged his tail and offered “Hello!” to Jimmy the doorman, who said “Hi,” warily. As Wulf and Annie crammed into the building’s small elevator, Wulf said, “I’m hungry.”

  “I’ll feed you when we’re upstairs,” Annie said.

  “Good! Thank you!”

  She smiled wanly. In a way, Beowulf was good company. At least he never made her feel like something left over from a different century.

  As she approached the apartment door, it unlocked itself, keyed to the chip that Don insisted she carry in her purse. The lights turned on. The refrigerator opened itself for Annie to put away the beer. As she closed the door, the refrigerator said in a silky female voice, “We are low on milk. Did you buy milk?”

  “No,” Annie said. She knew that the fridge, unlike Beowulf, was not speaking from any perceived emotion; Don had simply programmed it with recordings that reflected its scans of the UPC labels within. But Annie hated the refrigerator’s nagging almost as much as its seductive voice. Why did Don have to give it that voice? Because the refrigerator was what he wished Annie could be: sleek, efficient, obedient.

  Wulf said, “You seem upset. Can I fetch anything?”

  He looked at her with tender light-brown eyes, but Wulf had never been trained to fetch. And what could he have fetched her, anyway? A cup of tea? A stiff drink? The name of the girl who had phoned Annie at noon to announce her affair with Annie’s husband? Wulf didn’t even know what he was saying. The choice of words was forced into his mouth, just as Annie’s always were. She would never have the nerve to confront Don about the girl.

  All at once Wulf stood erect and sniffed the air. A low growl formed in his throat. The computer screen sunk flush with the kitchen wall brightened and announced, “A rat has invaded the kitchen.”

  How did it know that? Don had put various detectors—infrared, motion, God-knew-what—around the apartment. Maybe they were linked to the computer and could identify size or body heat or something. Wulf sn
uffled at the cabinet under the sink. Gingerly Annie opened it, but nothing came out. Now Wulf was nosing the base of the kitchen island, where Annie kept cereals and baking goods in a small cupboard. She flung open the cabinet door.

  The rat leaped out and began a dash across the kitchen floor toward the bathroom. Wulf cried “Kill!” and was on it instantly. He clamped it in his powerful jaws and the rat shrieked, a high inhuman sound, before Wulf shook it and bones snapped.

  Don’s face appeared on the screen. “I heard the alarm—what’s he got, what’s he got? A rat! Good boy, Wulf ! Annie, how the hell did a rat get into the apartment?”

  Slowly she looked away from the dead body in Wulf’s jaws. Borzoi were bred to chase wolves in the Russian forests; she’d had no idea that one would kill a rat. Or that Wulf’s artificially supplied vocabulary included that gleeful “Kill!”

  Don never raised his voice, not ever. Now he said quietly, “Rats come in when housekeeping falls below standard. Haven’t you been keeping the place clean?”

  “Ready to receive garbage,” the garbage pail said, opening as Wulf moved past it with his rat.

  “It’s time to start dinner,” the refrigerator said.

  “I’m leaving you,” Annie said.

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Don said. “You have nowhere to go.”

  He was right, of course. As soon as his face had disappeared from the TV, Annie faced that basic fact all over again. She could pack a bag, but then what? Don gave her just enough household money for two or three days, and even if she hadn’t spent most of the current allowance, it wouldn’t have been enough to buy even a bus ticket to Carol, or to Annie’s sister in North Carolina. Even if she could stand her sister. And if she could get to Carol, what kind of life would that be? “You’re a doormat, Mom,” Carol had said. “As long as you’re here anyway, would you mind taking the garbage downstairs?”

  Wulf said, “Stay here.” He had hidden the rat someplace and stood beside Annie, pressing his small, graceful head to her side.