Fictions

by Nancy Kress

  “There must be a larger consciousness, Eliot. If so, it is a physical entity, made up of energy and matter, must be a physical entity. And a physical entity can be described mathematically, possibly through a system that does not yet exist, possibly based on non-local quantum physics.”

  Eliot managed to say, “You aren’t a quantum physicist.”

  “I can learn.” Twitch twitch TWITCH. “Do you remember what Werner Heisenberg said about belief systems? ‘What we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning.’ I need a new method of questioning to lead toward a new mathematics.”

  “Well, that’s a—”

  “They’re letting me have my laptop back, with controlled wifi access, until I go home.”

  “Have they said when that might be?”

  “Possibly in a few more weeks.”

  Dr. Tremling beamed, twitching. Eliot tried to beam, too. He was getting what he’d wanted—his father back home, working on mathematics. Only—”a new mathematics” ? His father was not Godel or Einstein or Heisenberg. He wasn’t even an endowed chair.

  Eliot burst out, before he knew he was going to say anything, “There’s no evidence for any larger consciousness! It’s mystical wish-fulfillment, a non-rational delusion! There’s just no evidence!”

  “I’m the evidence. Son, I don’t think I actually told you what I experienced.” He leaned closer; involuntarily Eliot leaned back. “It was Zeus, but it was also Odin, was Christ, was . . . oh, let me think . . . was Isis and Sedna and Bumba and Quetzalcoatl. It was all of them and none of them because the images were in my mind. Of course they were, where else could they possibly be? But here’s the thing—the images are unimportant. They’re just metaphors, and not very good ones—arrows pointing to something that has neither image nor words, but just is. That thing is—how can I explain this?—the world behind the world. Didn’t you ever feel in childhood that all at once you sort of glimpsed a flash of a great mystery underlying everything, a bright meaning to it all? I know you did because everybody does. Then we grow up and lose that. But it’s still there, bright and shining as solid as . . . as an end table, or a pig. I saw it and now I know it exists in a way that goes beyond any need to question its existence—the way I know, for instance, that prime numbers are infinite. It’s the world beyond the world, the space filled with shining light, the mystery. Do you see?”

  “No!”

  “Well, that’s because you didn’t experience it. But if I can find the right mathematics, that’s a better arrow than verbal metaphors can ever be.”

  Eliot saw in his father’s eyes the gleam of fanaticism. “Dad!” he cried, in pure anguish, but Dr. Tremling only put his hand on Eliot’s knee, a startlingly rare gesture of affection, and said, “Wait, son. Just wait.”

  Eliot couldn’t wait. His English assignment was due by third period, which began, with the logic of high school scheduling, at 10:34 A.M. No late assignments were accepted. His tablet on his knees on the crowded bus, Eliot wrote: Memory is not a room or a bridge or a corn stalk with blight. Memory is not a metaphor because nothing is a metaphor. Metaphors are constructions of a fanciful imagination, not reality. In reality everything is what it is, and that is—or certainly should be!—enough for anybody!

  The little boy sitting next to him said, “Hey, man, you hit that thing so hard, you gonna break it.”

  “Shut up,” Eliot said.

  “Get fucked,” the kid answered.

  But Eliot already was.

  Dr. Tremling came home three weeks later. He was required to see a therapist three times a week. Aunt Sue bustled over, cooked for two days straight, and stocked the freezer with meals. When Eliot and his father sat down to eat, Dr. Tremling’s eye twitched convulsively. Meals were the only time they met. His father chewed absently and spoke little, but then, that had always been true. The rest of the time he stayed in his study, working. Eliot did not ask on what. He didn’t want to know.

  Everything felt suspended. Eliot went to school, took his AP classes, expressed scorn for the jocks and goths who teased him, felt superior to his teachers, read obsessively—all normal. And yet not. One day, when his father was at a therapy session, Eliot slid into Dr. Tremling’s study and looked at his notebooks and, to the extent he could find them amid such sloppy electronic housekeeping, his computer files. There didn’t seem to be much notation, and what there was, Eliot couldn’t follow. He wasn’t a mathematician, after all. And his father appeared to have invented a new symbol for something, a sort of Olympic thunderbolt that seemed to have left- and right-handed versions. Eliot groaned and closed the file.

  Only once did Eliot ask, “So how’s it going, Dad?”

  “It’s difficult,” Dr. Tremling said.

  No shit. “Have you had any more . . . uh . . . incidents?”

  “That’s irrelevant, son. I only needed one.” But his face twitched harder than ever.

  Three weeks after he came home, Dr. Tremling gave up. He hadn’t slept for a few nights and his face sagged like a bloodhound’s. But he was calm when he said to Eliot, “I’m going to have the operation.”

  “You are?” Eliot’s heart leapt and then, inexplicably, sank. “Why? When?”

  His father answered with something of his old precision. “Because there is no mathematics of a larger conscious entity. On Tuesday at eight in the morning. Dr. Tallman certified me able to sign my own papers.”

  “Oh.” For a long terrible moment Eliot thought he had nothing more to say. But then he managed, “I’m sorry about the pig.”

  “It’s not important,” Dr. Tremling said, which should have been the first clue.

  On Tuesday Eliot rose at 5:00 A.M., and took a cab to the hospital. He sat with his father in Pre-Op, in a vibrantly and mistakenly orange waiting room during the operation, and beside his father’s bed in Post-Op. Dr. Tremling recovered well and came home a week later. He was quiet, subdued. When the new term started, he resumed teaching at the university. He read the professional journals, weeded the garden, fended off his sister. Nobody mentioned the incident, and Dr. Tremling never did, either, since hospital tests had verified that it was gone from his memory. Everything back to normal.

  But not really. Something had gone missing, Eliot thought—some part of his father that, though inarticulate, had made his eyes shine at a breakthrough in mathematics. That had made him love pigs. That had led him, in passion, to fling bad student problem sets and blockhead professional papers across the room, as later he would fling furniture. Something was definitely missing.

  “Isn’t it wonderful that Carl is exactly the way he used to be?” enthused Aunt Sue. “Modern medicine is just amazing!”

  Eliot didn’t answer her. On the way home from school, he got off the bus one stop early. He ducked into the Safeway as if planning to rob it, carrying out his purchase more secretively than he’d ever carried out the Trojans he never got to use. In his room, he locked the door, opened the grocery boxes, and spread out their contents on the bed.

  On the dresser.

  On the desk, beside his calculus homework.

  On the computer keyboard.

  When there were no other surfaces left, on the not-very-clean carpet.

  Then, hoping, he stared at the toaster pastries until his head ached and his eyes crossed from strain.

  Eliot wrote, “Metaphor is all we have.” But the assignment had been due weeks ago, and his teacher refused to alter his grade.

  A HUNDRED HUNDRED DAISIES

  Nancy Kress tells us, “Although I now live in Seattle, I used to live in various cities along the Great Lakes, where the issue in this story is a very real one. I heard a lecturer from the University of Rochester say that ‘The next big war will not be fought over oil, but over water: Because the Great Lakes hold so much of the world’s fresh water, people like Danny and Ruthie will be right in the line of fire. This story is less fiction than prophesy:’ Nancy Kress’s most recent novel is Steal Across the Sky
(Tor). She lives in Seattle with her new husband, writer Jack Skillingstead. You can follow her blog at nancykress.blogspot.com.

  I hear him go out the front door. The wind had stopped, like it always does at sundown, and even though he was moving quiet as a deer, I’d been lying awake for this. My clock says 2:30 A.M. The hot darkness of my bedroom presses all around me. The front door closes and the motion-detector light on the porch comes on. We still have electricity. The light stays on ten full minutes, in case of robbers.

  Like we have anything left to steal.

  I’m ready. Shoes and jacket on, window open. After supper I took the sensor out of the motion light on the west side of the house. My father doesn’t notice. He’s headed the other way, toward the road.

  Out the window, down the maple tree, around the house. He’d parked the truck way down the road, clear past the onion field. What used to be the onion field. Quietly I pull my bicycle, too old and rusty to sell, out from my mom’s lilac hedge. No flowers again this year.

  The truck starts, drives away. I pedal along the dark road, losing him at the first rise. It doesn’t matter. I know where he’s going, where they’re all going, where he thought he could go without me. No way. I’m not a child, and this is my future, too.

  Somewhere in the roadside scrub a small animal scurries away. An owl hoots. The night, so hot and dry even though it’s only May, draws sweat from me, which instantly evaporates off my skin. There are no mosquitoes. I pedal harder.

  Allen Corporation has posted a guard at the construction site, where until now there has been no guard, nor a need for one. Did someone tip them off? Is the law out there, with guns? I’ve beaten my father to the site, which at first puzzles me, and then doesn’t. He would have joined up with the others somewhere, some gathering place to consolidate men and equipment. You couldn’t just roar up here in a dozen pick-ups and SINs, leaving tracks all over the place.

  A single floodlight illuminates the guard, throwing a circle of yellow light. He sits in a clear, three-sided shack like the one where my sister Ruthie waits for the school bus with her little friends. I can see him clearly, a young guy, not from here. At least, I don’t recognize him. He’s got on a blue uniform and he’s reading a graphic novel. He lifts a can to his mouth, drinks, goes back to the book.

  Is he armed? I can’t tell.

  A thrill goes through me, starting at my belly and tingling clear up to the top of my head. I can do this. My father and the others will be here soon. I can get this done before they arrive.

  “Hey, man!” I call out, and lurch from the darkness. The guard leaps to his feet and pulls something from his pocket. My heart stops. But it’s not a gun—too small. It’s a cell phone. He’s supposed to call somebody else if there’s trouble.

  “Stop,” he says in a surprisingly deep voice.

  I stop, pretend to stagger sideways, and then right myself and put on what Ruthie calls my “goofy head”—weird grin, wide eyes. I slur my words. “Can I ha’ one o’ those beers? You got more? I’m fresh out!”

  “You are trespassing on private property. Leave immediately.”

  “No beer?” I try to sound tragic, like somebody in a play in English class.

  “Leave immediately. You are trespassing on private property.”

  “Okay, okay, sheesh, I’m going already.” Now I can make out the huge bulk of the pipeline, twenty feet beyond the guard shack. I stagger again and fall forward, flat on my face, arms extended way forward so he can see that my hands are empty. ‘Aw, fuck.”

  The guard says nothing. At the edge of my vision I see him finger the cell. He doesn’t want to look like a fool, calling in about one drunken kid, waking up Somebody Important at three in the morning. But he doesn’t want to make a mistake, either. I help him decide. I turn my head and puke onto the ground.

  This is a thing I learned to do when I was Ruthie’s age: vomit at will without sticking a finger down my throat. I practiced and practiced until I could do it anytime I wanted to impress my friends or get out of school. So I lay there hurling my cookies, and I’m not a big guy: five-nine and 145 pounds. Middle-weight wrestling class.

  The guard makes a sound of disgust and moves closer. Clearly I’m no threat. “Get out of here, you fag. Now!”

  I flail feebly on the ground.

  “I said get out!” He yells louder, like that might sober me, and moves in for a kick. When he’s close enough, I spring. He’s bigger and older, but I was runner-up for state wrestling champion. Before he knows it, I’ve got him on the ground. Illegal hold, unnecessary roughness, unsportsmanlike conduct: two penalty points.

  He shouts something and fights back, even though that increases his pain. I’m not sure I can hold him; he’s strong. I hear a truck in the distance.

  The guy is going to get free.

  My father will be here any minute.

  Adrenaline surges through me like a tsunami.

  The ground is littered with construction-site rubble. I pick up a rock and bash him on the head. He drops like a fifty-pound sack of fertilizer, and that throws me off-balance. I go down, too, and my head strikes some random piece of metal. Everything blurs except the thought Oh God what if I killed the fucker? When I can see again I drag myself over to him. Blood on his head, but he’s breathing. I’ve dragged myself through my own vomit. The truck halts.

  Men rush forward. My father says, “Danny?”

  “Christ, Larry, what is this?” Mr. Swenson, who farms next to us. Used to farm next to us.

  I gasp, “Took . . . out guard . . . for you.”

  “Oh, fuck,” somebody else says. And then, “Kid, did he see your face?”

  The answer must have been on my own face, because the man snaps, “You couldn’t have worn a ski mask?”

  “Shut up, Ed,” Mr. Swenson says. I can’t get out my answer: I didn’t know there’d be a guard! Someone is bending over the guard, lifting him in a fireman’s carry. Someone else is pulling back my eyelids and peering at my eyes—a doctor? Is Dr. Radusky here? No, he wouldn’t . . . he can’t . . . Things grow fuzzier. I lose a few minutes, but I know I’m not passed out because I’m aware of both my father kneeling beside me and parts of the argument floating above:

  “—do it anyway!”

  “—Larry’s kid screwed us and—”

  “We came here to—”

  “The law—”

  “I’m not leaving until I do what I come for!”

  They do it, all of them except Dad. Quick and hard, panting and grunting. The night shrieks with pick-axes, chain saws, welding torches. Someone moves the floodlight pole closer to the pipeline.

  The huge pipe, forty-eight inches in diameter and raised above the ground on stanchions to let animals pass underneath, is being wrecked. Only a thirty-foot section of its monstrous and unfinished length, but that’s enough. For now. I hear a piece of heavy equipment, dozer or backhoe, start up, move. A moment later, a crash.

  More pipe down.

  It’s over in twenty minutes, during which I vomit once more, this time unwilled. Puking again blurs my vision. When it clears, my father is pulling me to my feet. I stagger against him. Before someone kills the floodlight, I see the Allen Corporation Great Lakes Water Diversion Pipeline lying in jagged pieces. I see dust covering everything to an inch thick and still falling from the sky, like rain. I see the farm the way it was when I was Ruthie’s age, the corn green and spiky, Mom’s lilacs in bloom, the horse pasture full of wildflowers. I see my dead grandfather driving the combine. I know then that my head hasn’t cleared at all, and that I am hallucinating.

  But one thing I see with total clarity before I pass out: my father’s grim, tightlipped face as he half-carries me to the pick-up full of men.

  The law is at our house by 6:30 A.M.

  Before that, Dr. Radusky came by. He made me do various things. “Concussion,” he said, “consistent with falling off his bicycle and hitting his head. Keep him awake, walking around as much as you can, and bring
him to my office tomorrow for another look-see. No school today or tomorrow, and no wrestling for longer than that.” He didn’t look at my father, but Dr. Radusky knew, of course. The whole town knew.

  “Larry,” my mother says in the hallway beyond my bedroom. They’re taking turns making sure I sit up, walk around, and don’t sleep. “Sheriff is downstairs.”

  “Uh-huh.” My father leaves.

  My mother comes into my room and snaps, not for the first time, “What in Christ’s name were you thinking?”

  I don’t answer. If they don’t see that I’m a hero, the hell with them.

  “I’m going downstairs,” she says. “Don’t lie down, Danny. Promise me.”

  I nod sullenly. As soon as she’s gone, Ruthie slides in. She’s dressed for school in jeans and an old green blouse that used be Mom’s. It’s been cut down somehow to sort of fit her. “Danny,” she whispers, “what did you do?”

  “Nothing, squirt.”

  “But everybody’s mad at you!”

  “I was out riding my bike and fell off it and hit my head. That’s all.”

  “Out riding in the night? Why?”

  “You wouldn’t understand.” My head throbs and aches.

  “Were you going to see a girl?”

  I wish. “None of your business.”

  “Was it Jenny Bradford?”

  “Beat it, squirt.”

  “I’m going to go downstairs and listen.”

  “No, you’re not!”

  “If I don’t, then will you tell me another picture?”

  Ruthie scavenges photographs. She ferrets them out of the boxes and envelopes where Mom has shoved them, hidden all over the house because Mom can’t bear to look at them anymore. I remember her doing it, crying as she ripped some from their frames—there used to be a lot of framed pictures all over the place—and tossed the silver frames into the box for the pawnshop. Now Ruthie finds them and brings them to me to identify things: That’s Great Uncle Jim in front of the barn we sold to the Allen people; that’s Grandpa driving the combine. She doesn’t remember any of it, but I do.