Fictions

by Nancy Kress

  “Which one do you like?” Rob asked his wife. The question came out humble—but, then, what did not when he talked to Karen? His belly clenched and cramped.

  She stood with the print-outs in her hand, lips pursed, long polished nails holding the pages as if they had just been removed from the bottom of the parrot’s cage instead of from Rob’s HP. The parrot squawked derisively. The nails were blood red.

  “I don’t like any of them,” she said.

  He tried to breathe evenly. “Why not?”

  “Oh, Rob, come on—the pathetic fallacy? That weather embodies human feelings? It was old when Wordsworth did it.”

  “This isn’t Wordsworth—”

  “Obviously.”

  “—it’s an opening in four different genres to, you know, get my feet wet again. Family drama, science fiction, romance, mystery. The mystery is supposed to be a sort of comedy, kind of. Every possible detective has already been used—butcher, baker, candlestick maker—so these detectives are two buildings who solve murders.”

  “Buildings?”

  “You know, smart-system buildings. They cooperate.”

  “Buildings!’

  “Or I might have one building and a side-kick that is a garden shed.”

  Karen dropped the pages on the floor. “Sure, why not? Even though there are no ‘Elm Streets’ anymore because there are no elms anymore. They all died of disease. And ‘a dark and stormy night’ ! Maybe you could get Snoopy to blurb the book.” She walked out of his study.

  Rob picked up his print-outs. Was Karen right? She usually was. She was smarter than he was, more decisive, more . . . there.

  Too much there.

  He squashed the heretical thought—Karen was a wonderful wife! She told him so, often—and laid the pages on his desk, which looked as barren as his imagination. Truth was, he had had these four openings for six months, which was the last time he’d written anything. But now he was going to get moving again! He was! And he had a secret weapon!

  From a drawer he took out the Barnes & Noble bag and drew out the first of a stack of books: Writing That Best Seller You Know You Have Somewhere in You! In the index he found “block, writer’s” and then the relevant page with advice in big capital letters:

  THE ANSWER TO BEING “STUCK” IS SIMPLE: ADD ANOTHER PERSON, COMPLICATION, OR IDEA TO YOUR STORY TO GET IT MOVING AGAIN! GUARANTEED! SOMETIMES YOU CAN EVEN INCORPORATE ELEMENTS FROM SOMETHING ELSE YOU’RE WORKING ON!

  Rob sat down at the computer. The parrot—it was Karen’s parrot, but she didn’t want it in the main part of the house—squawked and dropped a seed husk on his head. Outside the window, clouds roiled and blew.

  It was a dark and stormy night. But it shouldn’t have been.

  “You promised me an evening full fair, and a bright moon” the queen said evenly. Her rosy bottom lip caught lightly between her small, even, very white teeth.

  “Your Grace . . . the portents said . . .” The astrologer quaked in his bedsocks. He had not had time to pull on boots before there was a clap of thunder and a vision appeared in the privy chamber: three people strangely dressed, one lying on a bed with tubes and filigree running into his body. Sorcery indeed! “Don’t pull the plug, Celia!” the man on the bed shouted. “I’m in here! I can hear you!” The other two people, a man with his hand on the breast of a woman, did not seem to hear. Behind the vision, the hearth fire crackled, sharp as the lightning outside.

  “What evil is this?” cried the queen, drawing back in terror, just as the man rose from the bed and—

  Okay, not those two stories. Rob hit Delete and tried again.

  It was a dark and stormy night. But it shouldn’t have been.

  “What the—” Carson said.

  “Too much bloody wind!” Anna bent closer to the screen, as if that might give her a different reading. “You were only supposed to mix the atmospheric layers enough to keep them from separating!”

  “I did!” Carson cried. Under the sealed biodome three miles away on the Scottish moors, two smart buildings swayed in the gale.

  LOOK OUT! 652 sent. I’M LOSING BRICKS! WARN YOUR PEOPLE NOT TO—

  A loose brick blew off its eaves and smashed the skull of a man staggering against the wind toward the door. The dropping temperature brought on condensation and it began to rain.

  Rob put his head in his hands. His belly hurt again.

  Karen was out of town, at yet another academic conference. Lately academia had been holding a lot of conferences. Rob supposed it had something to do with English department politics. Nearly everything did.

  While she was gone, he went down to the drugstore to pick up more Maalox. A cleaning crew had invaded the house and was flinging around his grandmother’s antiques, scrubbing and polishing. Rob couldn’t remember what this set of professional cleaners called themselves; Karen changed companies almost as often as decorators. His trust fund could stand it, of course, but even so. . . .

  Sometimes he had wet dreams of a small cottage with a single chair drawn up before the hearth, a table for his computer, and a narrow bed.

  The girl behind the photo counter beckoned to him.

  “You Mr. Carpenter?”

  “Yes. . . .”

  “Well, are you or aren’t you? Don’t you know?”

  “Yes,” he said, more firmly. “I’m Mr. Carpenter.”

  “Yeah, I seen you in here before. Your pictures are ready.”

  Rob hadn’t ordered any pictures. But she was already holding a white envelope out toward him, her expression commanding. How did such a short, young person have so much confidence? She had purple hair, black lipstick, pierced nose, and enough eyeliner to tag the side of a building. Her employee name plate said VIOLET. He had never seen anyone less like that shy and delicate flower.

  She said, “Why the fuck does anybody still use film?”

  “I don’t,” Rob tried to say, but she talked over him.

  “I mean, it has a nostalgic quality and all, but digital gives you the capacity to create amazing photographic art.”

  “I don’t—”

  “I’m an art major at the university. I know. That’s six-forty, please. Did you see the photo exhibit at the gallery on Carrington Street? You should. I can’t believe anybody hasn’t been yet. Six dollars and forty cents!”

  He handed her the money. It seemed easier. She was a gale, an irresistible wind. In his Lexus (Karen’s purchase), he looked at the white envelope. Yes, it said “R Carpenter”—unless that was an “L.” Smudging on top of bad penmanship. He slid out the photos.

  Karen, naked beneath the hairy back of a man with long blond hair.

  Rob sat staring at the photos. A colleague? A graduate student? “Why the fuck does anybody still use film?” To control the copies.

  Rain streaked the windshield. Carefully, as if they might break, Rob slid the photos back into the white envelope. Fingers trembling, he opened the bottle of Maalox. Some of it spilled onto the envelope and he wiped it off, as panicky as if acid had fallen on a medieval manuscript. He swigged down a quarter bottle of Maalox.

  This wasn’t a thing he could discuss with Karen on the phone. Unthinkable. It would have to wait until she returned on Tuesday. Yes.

  He recognized the feeling that swept over him then: relief. He could put off the confrontation with his cheating wife for a few days; he was temporarily safe. It was such a shaming realization that again he reached for the Maalox, while the rain made long dirty tracks down the window.

  It was best to keep busy. Everybody knew that. When anxious or depressed, keep busy.

  Rob sat down at his keyboard. He stared at it until his eyes crossed, his vision blurred, and QWERTY became CUE DIX. Other than that advice (Dix who? Cue about what?), his mind was numb, a cold white entity in a blank white room.

  The second book in his Barnes & Noble bag, titled Plot or Die, had a cover illustration of tombstones fashioned of sagging and failed-looking books. It also had a section on writer’s bl
ock. He read:

  “The secret to never getting stuck on a manuscript is to genuinely inhabit your protagonist. Become him or her. This is akin to Method acting—you must so fully enter into your characters’ very being that you feel with their fingers, ache with their hearts, be flooded with their thoughts. Then your story will automatically move forward because you will know what they do next. You will be in the story, and astonished at how simple this technique is once you fully try it!”

  Fully doing anything sounded good to Rob. He had been wandering around the house, picking things up and setting them down, unable to eat or sleep. Maybe it would help to become somebody else.

  Of course I can hear you, you fuckers, Jason thought. He could hear everything his unfaithful wife and his treacherous brother said, even over the storm in the hospital room. He heard the hum of the machinery hooked to him at nose and heart and arm and toes, the rubber wheels of a trolley in the corridor. He was trapped in this motionless and unconscious body, but he could—

  He was trapped in this motionless and unconscious body. Rob couldn’t move his arms, his legs, his eyelids. He was lying on a hospital bed and—

  No. He wasn’t. He was in his study, and the parrot had somehow pooped through the bars of its cage and onto Rob’s shoulder. The bird squawked at a squirrel, which had just leaped from Karen’s yew topiary to the windowsill. A squirrel had bitten Rob when he was eight, and he hated them. They were just rats in camouflage.

  Downstairs, the front door opened. A suitcase dropped in the hall. Karen was back.

  Scenes like this one, Rob discovered, never ended. They started but they didn’t finish because even if there were breaks—she goes to work, you go to the bathroom, everybody pretends to go to sleep—the whole miserable thing just resumed again the next time you were together, with no end in sight. It was like the Rocky films, or a football game with a clock that never ran out.

  “You had no right to open my pictures!” Karen said. She had always been good on offense.

  “You’re having an affair!” Rob said, trying a play enfeebled by repetition.

  “And whose fault is that? If you and I ever had sex, I might not look for it elsewhere!”

  “But it was you who—”

  “No, it wasn’t! You’re never here!”

  This feint confused Rob. “I’m always here.”

  “That’s what I mean! You never leave the house, don’t have any friends—you just wander around living inside your head, always physically present and never emotionally there!”

  “But I—”

  “Never!”

  Rob tried a Hail-Mary pass, his last and most desperate attempt to score. “I should divorce you and take my trust fund with me.”

  “Go ahead!”

  Not the right response—what was in her playbook? Karen faced him defiantly, breathing hard, the gleam of triumph in her eyes. Why triumph? He’d always suspected she’d married him mostly for the money, anyway. His head hurt. To his own horror, he was afraid he might cry.

  “Karen . . .”

  She saw immediately that she’d defeated him. “Go to bed, Rob. I’m going to sleep in the guest room.”

  He went, desolate and humiliated and angry. Also confused—what was he missing here?

  In the morning she had left for the university, but in the kitchen were a fresh pot of coffee and his favorite cinnamon rolls, still warm from the oven. What did that mean?

  He didn’t dare call her at work; she never allowed that. He went to his study and stared at the third book on writing, Get It Down and Get It Sold! This one, co-authored by two romance writers, shimmered with motherly concern:

  “Writer’s block is the feeling that your story simply will not move ahead. It feels terrible, doesn’t it? We’re not going to offer you easy fixes for this. But there is something that works for us. Go back to the last point in your story where you were excited about it, and start again from that place. That’s where your story still had the necessary spark. Delete everything after that.”

  Rob scrolled back through his story, looking for the last place he was excited about any of his openings. He deleted everything else, then stared at what was left, the part with spark:

  It was a dark and—

  His stomach hurt.

  He ran out of Maalox. All the way to the drugstore, his belly ached and rumbled. Violet had migrated from the photo counter to check-out, where she stood scowling at a magazine. When he approached with the jumbo-sized bottle, she held it out to him accusingly. “Look at that! Just look at that!”

  The magazine was Time, and the article a report on the art show of someone Rob had never heard of. Facing pages displayed canvasses of stylized street scenes.

  “And they call that art!” Violet said. “He should be shot!”

  “Just this bottle,” Rob said. Pain shot through his stomach.

  “That stuff’s no good for you, Mr. Carpenter,” Violet said. “If you’re having indigestion, you need to eat better. Like, what did you have for breakfast?”

  “Cinna—God!” Pain so sharp he doubled over in agony. Violet rushed from around the counter.

  “Hey! What is it!”

  Another lacerating pain, and he fell to the floor. “Call . . .” he tried to gasp, but she was already there, efficiently talking to 911 on her cell, summoning the manager with a little bell, loosening his belt. As she bent over him, the jewelry in her pierced nose became clear: a filigree moon imposed on a filigree sun imposed on a jagged bolt of lightning, all exquisitely miniature. It was the last thing Rob saw before he fainted.

  A hospital room. A stomach pump. Blood in his vomit. Then blessed, artificially induced sleep, and when he woke again, it was to the newly cleansed feeling of a long fast, or of Saturday morning confession as a boy. Bring it on, God, even unto being hit by a Mack truck—I’m covered.

  Karen sat in a chair by his bed, marking student papers on a clipboard. Before she noticed him, he watched her slash red marks all over some poor chump’s efforts. In her severe, rectangular glasses she looked formidable.

  “Rob! You’re awake!”

  Voice sweet and concerned—why? After the first shock, Rob didn’t care. Karen was as he remembered from the first days of his courtship. She fluffed his pillow. She laughed at his jokes. She raced down to the cafeteria to bring him a gelatinous mess that called itself chocolate pudding. She kissed him on the lips when she left. So this was what all those Country and Western songs meant! You never did appreciate what you had until you nearly lost it! His bout of illness had reminded Karen that she loved him. As for the photo . . . Well, anyone could slip once. She had just assured him, with tears in her eyes, that it had been that.

  Lying in bed with his arms crossed behind his head, Rob smiled and glowed and watched the sun shine outside his window. He and Karen would weather this. And then they would be stronger together afterward, just like in that song by what’s-his-name, the guy with the guitar who—

  A doctor came in. “Mr. Carpenter?”

  “Yes.” He was Mr. Carpenter and Karen—gloriously—was Mrs. Carpenter. Rob smiled at the doctor.

  “I’d like to ask you a few questions.”

  “Sure.”

  “Are you under a psychiatrist’s care?”

  “No.”

  “Have you ever been hospitalized with a psychiatric condition?”

  “No!”

  “Have you ever been diagnosed at any time with pica disease?”

  “No—what’s that?” Rob became worried. Was it some weird form of cancer?

  “Are you a gardener, Mr. Carpenter?”

  “No.” He hated yard work and so had hired a gardener. “Why? What is this about?”

  “Your blood work and toxin screen turned up a strange substance: yew bark. Do you know how you might have ingested that?” The doctor’s eyes were sharp.

  “No,” Rob said. But all at once he did.

  Karen was trying to kill him.

  There were cops,
but Rob lied to them. He said he’d had childhood episodes of pica disease, once he’d looked it up on his phone (“A medical disorder characterized by an appetite for substances largely non-nutritive: e.g. metal, clay, coal, etc.”). Lately, he said, the craving had returned. The cops wrote it down, scowled at him, and clumped off, weighed down by their guns, phones, and disgust.

  There was another visit from Karen, sweet as before. Rob laughed along with her and thought, You want my money. Badly enough to kill him for it. So why not turn her in? She obviously deserved it, and it would keep him safe. Why not? He kept that question to mull over after she left.

  Before he could do so, he had two more visitors. First came John from next door, who stayed an embarrassed ten minutes and escaped like a man fleeing a tornado. A duty visit. Please, no more like that!

  Into the hospital room walked Violet from the drugstore. “Hey, Rob.”

  Rob blinked, torn between surprise at seeing her and surprise that he was no longer “Mr. Carpenter.” Then he understood: Illness had demoted him. But why had she come? And she looked different somehow, although he couldn’t tell how. The hair was just as purple, the eyeliner just as heavy, the lipstick just as black, nose just as pierced.

  “Hi,” he said weakly. He didn’t feel weak, but maybe lassitude would make her leave. He wanted to be alone to think about Karen.

  Violet flopped into the bedside chair. “I came to see how you are. Since you had that attack right there in the store and all, and I was the one who called 911. Wow, you got a private room.”

  “I’m fine!” Rob said, too brightly. “Going home tomorrow!”

  She looked at him steadily. The look became a gaze, the gaze became a lance, piercing right into Rob’s skull. It went on and on, and he couldn’t look away. Outside the window, thunder sounded.

  Finally Violet said, “Okay,” and Rob gave a little gasp, as if she’d released him.

  She ignored the gasp but wasn’t done with him. “Only you’re not okay, are you? You have imagination.”

  It was the last thing he’d expected her to say, and she pronounced it as if it were a disease, like “pica.” Rob must have looked baffled because she added, “Impotent imagination.”