Fictions

by Nancy Kress

  “Come on, Browne!”

  The dog leapt off the rug by the fireplace and trotted after Zack. Every morning they went for a walk in the woods together. Every afternoon Zack went again, alone. That’s all it was, a walk. Nothing else. No matter what he saw.

  That afternoon, it was a deer. Zack had sat very still for a long time beside a deadfall at the edge of a clearing, cold eventually seeping through even his parka, waiting for whatever came along. The deer stepped hesitantly into the far edge of the clearing, downwind.

  It’s going to move left . . . .

  The deer moved right, stepping daintily on delicate hooves.

  It’s going to push aside some snow and look for grass the way they do . . . .

  The deer lifted its head and sniffed the air.

  It’s going to run away, I know it, it’s getting ready to run . . . .

  The deer stayed in the clearing another three minutes, until Zack jumped up and cursed the stupid thing and it fled, silent and swift as thought.

  Zack stomped home, slammed the door, and got drunk.

  He was acting crazy, and when he was sober he knew it, and when he was sober he got drunk so that he didn’t care that he was acting crazy.

  He built a wall of snow, using the shovel delivered by a sullen teenage boy driving an SUV, and lay down on top of the wall until he passed from shivering to drowsing. His lips were blue, he could barely walk on his frozen feet, and he understood that if he’d stayed there five more minutes, he might have died.

  He lured a chipmunk to the porch with stale Sara Lee and failed to predict when it would scamper off.

  He drew pictures of Jazzy, despite the fact that he couldn’t draw, and burned each one in the gas fireplace, first prying off its glass cover. That created acrid odors that made Browne move away indignantly.

  He boxed with a tree, an oak at least fifty years old, whose dry, sere leaves rattled with his blows while Zack’s knuckles ended up bloody and his left thumb got broken.

  In the woods he came across an animal he couldn’t identify, something brown and furry the size of a large wastebasket. It rose on its hind legs and snarled at him. Zack took one step closer, knowing that it would attack. It didn’t, dropping to all fours and lumbering off over the snow.

  He buried his cell phone under a pile of snow-damp leaves, as deeply and carefully as if conducting a funeral for a beloved child.

  He woke at night from dreams he couldn’t remember, with tears that shamed him so much that he raged at himself and rammed his broken fist into the unforgiving wall.

  Then he found the wolves.

  It was morning, which meant Browne was with him, which meant there should have been no animals around because Browne’s joyous barking usually scared them all away. Snow had just started to fall in cold, gray flakes. Zack, with a long thick oak branch as a walking stick, trudged behind the lodge. He turned the corner and there, just before the tree line and the bottom of the idle ski lift, a pack of wolves dotted bloody snow. They had brought down a fawn and were tearing it apart.

  One looked up and saw Zack and Browne.

  They stared at each other—was this the same wolf he’d seen years before? How long did wolves live? Zack began to back away. The fawn’s empty black eyes gazed at him. Its exposed entrails twisted like greasy ropes.

  Then a small wolf—young?—jumped forward and raced at Browne.

  The dog yelped and ran in circles, terrified. The rest of the wolf pack stayed motionless, watching its murderous whelp, watching Zack. The young wolf’s jaws closed on Browne’s tail.

  Browne’s cry of surprised pain galvanized Zack. He leapt at Browne, hitting out at the wolf with his oak branch. The branch connected, hard, and the wolf gave a single sharp yelp and fell on its side.

  The pack left the fawn and moved forward, snarling.

  Zack tried to grab Browne and failed. The little dog was too terrified. Two wolves slipped between Zack and the lodge.

  “Wolves don’t attack people,” Loffman had told Zack. “They’re scareder of you, boy, than you are of them.” But that wasn’t the way it looked now.

  He concentrated, his heart gonging faster than it ever had in the ring, trying to anticipate what the pack would do. They weren’t attacking—score one for Loffman—but they were watching him intently, and he was surrounded. So was Browne, who chose that moment to streak toward Zack.

  Instantly, the young wolf was in pursuit. He caught Browne in his jaws. Browne shrieked, a sound Zack had not known a dog could make, and Zack threw himself on both of them, trying to tear Browne free.

  “Let go, you fucker, let go—”

  A claw raked his cheek, and the pack moved forward.

  He was going to be torn apart by wolves, he and Browne both, “wolves don’t attack people, boy,” but I faced lions . . . He was Browne, the fighter not the dog, and he was being murdered by himself in the ring.

  The smell of wolf filled his nostrils, gamey and primitive. Jaws snapped close to Zack’s flailing hands. A shot pierced the cold winter air.

  The wolves scattered; the whelp dropping Browne. Zack picked him up. The dog still shrieked like something human. Gail ran from the lodge, her nine millimeter in her hand.

  “What the fuck!” she shouted, and to Zack it sounded like a prayer.

  In the animal-hospital waiting room, after Gail had driven her Jeep down the mountain like she or it was possessed, they finally spoke. The vet had rushed Browne into surgery. Gail looked at Zack and said, “What did you do to your hand?”

  “Broke the thumb.” After a silence he added, “Boxing with a tree.”

  “Huh,” Gail said.

  “Why were you there at the lodge?”

  “The same reason I always come—to check on you for Anne. I didn’t tell her I’d located you, because she would have wanted to come and I thought you might refuse to talk to her, or be even crazier than you are, or be dead.”

  “How did you find me?”

  “It wasn’t that hard. I know people, still.” And after another long silence she said, “Did Anne ever tell you how we met?”

  What? Zack didn’t care how Gail and Anne had met. He cared about Browne, and about nothing else except being so tired. Why was he so tired? It was only morning.

  Gail said, “I had a shitty life. I know you think you did, too, with your parents and all, but you aren’t nearly the badass you think you are. Weird, yes, but not a genuine badass. I was on crack, and in jail, and turning tricks to survive. Then I OD’d. Anne was my nurse in the hospital and all I wanted was for her to leave me alone so I could get back out on the street and do more crack. But then I assaulted a cop, never a good idea, and so I was back in the can. And Anne came to see me. Once, twice, a lot. It didn’t happen all at once. Or maybe it did, but I didn’t want to see it. Committing to Anne, to a drug-free life, to normalcy—it was a long way for me to fall. Into trust. I had to fall into trust, and into needing somebody, and it felt like such a long way to fall.”

  “I’m not interested in your lame story,” Zack said coldly.

  “Sure you are. You just don’t know it yet.”

  Zack said nothing, staring at his boots. They had on them snow, dead leaves, muck, blood.

  Gail said, “I’m going home now. I’m not telling Anne about this, although I will tell her you’re all right even if you’re cruel enough to not return her calls. You got your credit card? Good. You can get a cab back up the mountain, if you want to spend more of your undeserved fortune, or to someplace down here, I don’t care which. Where’s your phone?”

  “Six feet underground.”

  Gail didn’t even blink. She stood and stretched leisurely, and Zack saw the bulge of the nine millimeter at her waist. She walked away. Over her shoulder she said, “Jazzy’s husband left her. He was no good in the first place. She and the baby are at her mother’s.”

  Zack sat there another hour. He didn’t touch the cell phone that Gail had left on her plastic seat. Eventually the v
et emerged, dressed in scrubs and a paper hat, just like a doctor for people.

  “Your dog will be fine, Mr. Murphy. He needs to stay here a few days. The receptionist will tell you when you can take him home, and she’ll give you discharge instructions when you do. What happened to your hand?”

  “Nothing.”

  “That’s not nothing. You should go to an ER and have that looked at.”

  “Okay,” Zack lied.

  His hand hurt, but not much. The vet had not recognized him. Neither had the receptionist, nor the old lady holding a cat, nor the child and its mother with a rabbit restless in a red carrier. There was a whole world of people who didn’t know what Zack had been able to do—any of the things he’d been able to do—and didn’t care. Normal people, in a normal world.

  Trust, Gail had said.

  Zack picked up her phone and took it out to the parking lot. It was winter here, too, but not the snowy freezing winter of the mountains. Rain spat at him from an overcast sky. He stood between the animal hospital and a Dodge Caravan, and keyed in a number. With his left thumb broken and his right hand bloody, it was awkward. It should have been Anne first, Zack knew that; Anne had earned the right to be first. But that wasn’t the way it worked, because about one thing at least, Gail had been wrong.

  You didn’t fall a long way. Falling wasn’t enough. You had to leap.

  He waited through the ringing, the answer, the normal voice saying, “Hello?”

  “Jazzy,” he said. “Please don’t hang up. It’s me, just me. It’s Zack.”

  . . . AND OTHER STORIES

  On Gene Wolfe: I have known Gene for thirty years, and his work for even longer. When I met him, I was a young writer and in awe of this man. Decades later—after we have taught together, visited each other, blurbed each other, cut up fruit salad together— I still am in awe. No one else has produced anything like Gene’s body of work. No one else could.

  Yesterday I was in Emma. Unseen on Box Hill, as all servants are unseen, I unpacked hampers from the wagons and watched Emma flirt with Frank Churchill. Mr. Knightley glared at Emma. None of the other servants challenged my presence. Maybe they were too busy, or not allowed to talk among themselves while serving, or else the Hartfield servants thought I came from Donwell Abbey and Mr. Knightley’s groom assumed I came from Hartfield. Or not. I never find out that sort of thing.

  The grass on Box Hill was very green, soft and lush from English rain free of industrial pollutants. Emma was lovely in her absurd high-waisted muslin, and very bratty. I lugged the heavy hampers of food and blankets, china and wine, up the hill, but I was only there about thirty minutes before it ended.

  I never know how long it will last, or where I will go, or when. Sometimes I’m already in Grandmother’s house. Sometimes I’m shopping or at school, where I am mocked and shunned and friendless. Wherever I am, whatever I am doing, when the terrible summons comes, I have to race to Grandmother’s library. Then she does it to me, and there is no way to resist.

  “Lose yourself in literature,” my asshole English teacher tells the class.

  She has no idea.

  Thursday I’m in detention when the summons hits. Two days of detention for truancy, again. I sit working on quadratic equations and then all at once my skin is on fire, my bowels are turning to water, my mind howls with an icy wind. There is no resisting it. I jump up, knocking Advanced Algebra off the desk, and race to the door, which is locked. Shaking the lock, I howl like a hyena, unable to stop.

  “Caitlin!” shouts Mr. Emry.

  I howl louder. The others in detention are not the kind students who pity me or the timid ones who shun me; kind and timid students don’t end up in this basement room. The ones here laugh and point. I tear my hair, and Mr. Emry, trying to not look frightened, calls for Security. The moment the ex-cop hired by Wakefield High arrives to unlock the door from the outside, I am gone, evading his grasp, running down the hall and out of the school and down the street to Grandmother’s gloomy Victorian house. On the way I shit my jeans, but that never makes any difference. I collapse in the library and then I am in Anna Karenina.

  I recognize Anna from previous trips. She sits in the garden at Vozdvizhenskoe, sewing, her beautiful face clenched and sour. When I appear, she looks up. “Katerina, tea, please.”

  I go to fetch the tea tray from the kitchen. Everyone there accepts my presence; that is how Grandmother’s curse works. Never any difficulty with language or duties, just the unrelenting hard work of a menial. She hates me. I know why, but it is not fair.

  I carry the heavy tea tray to the garden. Count Vronsky has just returned from Moscow; he and Anna are quarreling. Their voices rise to a shout: “Oh, Anna, why are you so irritable?” I know that later she will take out her unhappiness on me, for witnessing it. Jealousy and regret and the boredom of exile have already changed her, and in a few more chapters she will return to Moscow, where she will be still more unhappy.

  By night my shoulders ache with the hard labor of a servant in czarist Russia. My legs tremble so much I can barely stand. I find my bed and collapse into it, but it seems I am barely asleep before there arrives the early dawn of a Russian summer, and I must rise to carry cans of hot water, scrub corridors and dishes, empty chamber pots. Anna Karenina is not as back-breaking as parts of David Copperfield, but it is hard enough.

  The irony is: I used to love to read.

  I am at Vozdvizhenskoe the entire week. Vronsky and Anna make up, fight again, say bitter things to each other. Levin has just arrived to visit Anna when I am snatched back to the library. I lay on the floor, panting and stinking, in my freshly soiled jeans. Here, no time has passed.

  “Welcome back,” Grandmother says. She guides her feather duster around the tusks of a carved elephant. She and my mother, the love of Grandmother’s life, bought it on their travels in India.

  I will not cry in front of her. I will not.

  “I think, Caitlin,” she says in her measured, calm voice, “now that you are sixteen, you should drop out of school. It does not seem to be doing you much good. I will obtain the paperwork for you to sign.”

  I cannot speak yet, nor move. When I have enough strength to get up off the floor, I stagger to the shower. Every muscle in my body hurts.

  The truant officer will, I know, show up here soon. I know, but I don’t care. School, with its jeering classmates, is only another kind of torture. Twice I have not made it out of the building before my bowels gave way. Dropping out doesn’t seem any worse than staying. Or any better.

  The summons began when I was twelve, six months after my mother died. Since then I have scrubbed chamber pots in Victorian England, starved in a labor camp with Ivan Denisovich, slaved in David Copperfield’s wine-bottling factory until my fingers bled, suffered a beating at Lowood Institute along with Jane Eyre. Three times I ran away from Grandmother. The first time I was thirteen and I got no farther than the park, carrying my sleeping bag and suitcase, before the summons hit me. The second time I was fourteen, and savvier. I stole money, bought a bus ticket, got as far as the next city. The summons hit and I tried frantically to hitchhike back to the library, my skin burning and my mind howling. When my bowels gave way, the kind woman who had picked me up took me straight to the emergency room. I jumped out of the car and staggered—was dragged, compelled, forced—to the library.

  Three months later, savvier still, I went voluntarily to the ER and acted crazy, waving around a kitchen knife and claiming hallucinations. I was examined, committed, sent to a locked psychiatric ward. It was wonderful. Grandmother was not allowed to visit. Then another inmate sat in the day room reading Les Misérables, and I was with Fantine and the other women forced into prostitution to survive. Fantine sold her hair, then her jewelry, but could not stop the inevitable. I had no jewelry, and my hair was already cut short. I was had by ten men in four days.

  “If you try that again,” Grandmother said, “it will be Les Misérables again.”

  In the middle
of that night, I set the library on fire. I poured gasoline siphoned from the lawn mower—we had no car—onto the parquet floor. I opened the window, went outside, and tossed in a flaming match, one of the long wooden kind used for fireplaces. The gasoline blazed for half a second and then went out. Two more matches. It didn’t burn.

  My grandmother appeared in the doorway in her long white nightdress, looking like a ghost, a phantom, a white demon from an icy hell. “Don’t do that again, Caitlin,” she said. “It won’t help. You took her life away from me. So yours belongs to me. That’s only fair. Now clean up this mess.”

  I screamed, “I didn’t mean what happened to Mama!”

  “Meaning is an illusion,” she said and went back to bed, leaving me alone outside the window, staring at the pool of gasoline on the polished golden floor.

  I drop out of school. I watch TV. I go for walks, but not very far. I read nonfiction. I’m in the kitchen, eating a ham sandwich and ignoring the dirty dishes piled in the sink, which I was supposed to wash last night, when the summons comes and I run to the library.

  It’s a medieval castle, further back in time than I have been before. Knights, ladies, servants gather in a great stone hall with banners on the wall and great smoky fires. Everyone is shouting, dogs are barking; it’s chaos. Finally one huge knight climbs onto a trestle table and makes himself heard above everybody else.

  “Now we have been served this day of what meats and drinks we thought on; but one thing beguiled us, we might not see the Holy Grail, it was so preciously covered. Wherefore I will make here avow, that to-morn, without longer abiding, I shall labor in the quest of the Sangreal, that I shall hold me out a twelve-month and a day, or more if need be, and never shall I return again unto the court till I have seen it more openly than it hath been seen here; and if I may not speed I shall return again as he that may not be against the will of our Lord Jesu Christ.”

  More shouting. The king—Arthur?—rises from a throne at the head of the table. Everybody falls silent. The king says, “Alas, said King Arthur unto Sir Gawaine, ye have nigh slain me with the vow and promise that ye have made; for through ye have bereft me the fairest fellowship and the truest of knighthood that ever were seen together in any realm of the world; for when they depart from hence I am sure they all shall never meet more in this world, for they shall die many in the quest. And so it forthinketh me a little, for I have loved them as well as my life, wherefore it shall grieve me right sore, the departition of this fellowship.”