Fictions

by Nancy Kress

  It lasted only a short time. Then the teevee went black.

  “I can’t believe the cube still works!” Jemmy said gleefully. “Want to see the other one?”

  But Guy said nothing. In the shadows cast upward from the lantern, his face looked much older, and almost in pain. He said, “What is it? What is it called?”

  “Ballet,” I said.

  Silently he handed me the pile of books. Three, four, five of them. The top one read in large gold letters: The Story of Giselle. The others were A Ballet Companion: The Joy of Classical Dance, Basic Ballet Positions, Dancing for Mr. B., and a very small 2016 Tour Schedule.

  Guy shivered. Jemmy, oblivious to all but his mechanical miracle, said, “The other one be longer. See, these cubes fit into this slot. Only two cubes still work, though.”

  White words on a black screen: TAKING CLASS ON VIDEO. Then a whole roomful of women and men standing—oh! at wooden railings before mirrors; the place might be our common room, long ago. Music from a piano and then a woman’s voice said, “Plié . . . and one two three four. Martine, less tense in your hand. Carolyn, breathe with the movement . . .”

  They were not on the ends of their toes, not until partway through “class.” Before that came strange commands from the unseen woman: battement tendu, rondes de jambs a terre, porte de bras. After they rose on the ends of their toes—but only the women, I noticed—came more commands: “Jorge, your hand looks like a dead chicken—hold the fingers loosely!” “No, no, Terry—you are doing this, and you should be doing this.” Then the woman herself appeared, and she looked as old or older than I, although much slimmer.

  “Now center work . . . No, that is too slow, John, and one and one and one . . . good. Now an arabesque penchée . . . Breathe with it, softly, softly . . .”

  On the teevee, dancers doing impossible, bewitching things with their bodies.

  “Again . . . Timon, please start just before the arabesque . . .”

  A roomful of dancers, each with one leg rising slowly behind, arms curved forward, to balance on one foot and make a body line so exquisite that my eyes blurred.

  The teevee again went black. Jemmy said, “Let’s not play it again—I want to save fuel.” Guy, to my astonishment, knelt before me, as if he were doing atonement to Mike.

  “Nurse, I need your help,” he said.

  “Get up, you young idiot!”

  “I need your help,” he repeated. “I want to bring Kara here, and I can’t without you.”

  Kara. All at once, certain speculative looks he has given her sprang into my mind. I pushed him away, scandalized. “Guy! You can’t bed Kara! Why, she hasn’t Begun, and even if she had, Mike would kill you!”

  “I don’t want to bed her!” He rose, looking no less desperate but much more determined. “I want to dance with her.”

  “Dance with her!”

  “Like that.” He gestured toward the blank teevee and tried out his new word, with reverence. “Ballet.”

  Even Jemmy looked shocked. “Guy—you can’t do that!”

  “I can learn. So can Kara.”

  I said the first thing that came into my mind, which, like most first things, was idiotic. “The Nurse on the teevee said it takes years of work to become a dancer!”

  “I know,” Guy said, “years to be like them be. But we could learn some, Kara and me, and maybe dance for the pack. Mike might like that.”

  “Mike like a girl who has not yet Begun to be handled by you? You’re crazy, Guy!”

  “I have to dance,” he said doggedly. “Ballet. With Kara. She be the only one possible!”

  He was right about that. Pretty, spoiled and conventional, would never learn the hard things which that dance Nurse had demanded. Tiny and Seela were too young, Lula and Junie busy with children, Bonnie big and ungainly—what was I thinking? The whole thing was not only ridiculous, but dangerous.

  “Put ballet out of your mind,” I said severely. “If you don’t, I will tell Mike.”

  I climbed ponderously down the ladder and made my way alone through the dark little theater to the door. But I carried the five books, and in my bare room in the underground of the David H. Koch Theater (I had finally found a faded sign with the correct name), I used an entire precious candle, reading them for most of the night.

  Two days later, the chief of the St. Regis pack returned Mike’s visit. This was a risk for him, since he arrived with only two lieutenants. It was a clear gesture of cooperation, not war, and it put everyone in a good mood. We ate at noon under a bright summer sky on a not-too-cracked terrace, beside a long shallow pool filled with both debris and two huge jutting pieces of stone that, looked at from certain directions, might be a person lying down. A sentence from my grandmother floated into my troubled mind: “Every autumn they had trouble with leaves in the Vivian Beaumont reflecting pool.”

  My girls built fires at first light and cooked all morning. None of the girls were present at the meal, of course; Mike would not let anyone but sworn pack men see how many women the pack possessed, nor which ones might be fertile. But I was there, serving the dishes, and the only one not cheerful.

  Mike had made a bad mistake.

  I knew it as soon as the chief of the other pack, Keither, began to talk. No, before—when I watched him as he studied Mike, studied our pack, studied the way the guards were set, studied everything he could see. Keither had a long, intelligent face and continuously darting eyes. He spoke well; I would bet my medicine box that this man could, and did, read. More, he had the ability to say whatever would be well received, without slipping into outright flattery. Mike, of much simpler mind, saw none of this. He had a leader’s nose for treachery but not for subtlety. He could not see that Keither, with a smaller and more lightly armed pack than Mike’s, aspired to the leadership of ours. There would be trouble. Not yet, maybe not even soon, but eventually.

  It would do no good to tell Mike this, of course. He would not listen. I was Nurse, but I was a woman.

  “I brought you a gift,” Keither said, when the food had been consumed and praised. From his sack he pulled out a bottle of Jack Daniel’s. Mike already knew it was there, of course—no sack could be brought unexamined beyond our perimeter. But if the men were not surprised, they were enormously pleased. Cups were passed around, toasts made, jokes exchanged. The younger men drank too much. Neither Mike nor Keither took more than a courtesy sip.

  Still, the liquor prolonged the meeting. Talk grew louder. The men agreed to a joint hunting expedition, to leave the next morning. Both chiefs would go—a much greater risk on their part than on ours, since their pack was so much smaller. We would also send twice as many men as they did, further lessening our risk. Keither had been based in Manhattan for months and offered to show Mike good and bad foraging areas, boundaries of other packs’ territories, and other useful information.

  “We have no Nurse,” Keither said. “Is yours up for trade? Or does she have an apprentice who is?”

  “No,” Mike said, with courtesy but without explanation. Keither didn’t mention it again.

  I was tired. Serving sixteen men, sitting cross-legged for hours on the concrete terrace, is hard on a body of my age. When the first tinges of sunset touched the sky, I caught Mike’s eye. He nodded and let me go.

  In the women’s room, the girls crowded around me. “What be they like?” “Did they bring any more gifts?” “Did you find out how many women they have?” The girls sounded too insistent, crowded too close; they were hiding something. And: “Be you tired, Nurse? Maybe you go to your room and rest?”

  I pushed off the wave of white robes. “Where’s Kara?”

  She sat alone in a corner. But the minute she raised her face, shining with exaltation, I knew. Or maybe I had known all along. After all, I could have left the feast hours earlier, and had not.

  This way, I was innocent. So far.

  My false innocence did not last past the next afternoon. Mike and nine other men departed on the hunting tri
p, leaving his first lieutenant, Joe, in command. Joe sent me with a guard of three men to the ruins of a nearby drugstore to see if there were any medicines I could use. There weren’t; the place had been picked over long ago. Most of my medicines came from homes, left in ruined bathrooms, stored in drawers beside beds crawling with vermin. The expiration dates on the drugs have long since passed. However, a surprising number of them were still effective, and scalpels, scissors, gauze, and alcohol swabs don’t decay.

  By the time we got back, it was mid-afternoon of a gorgeous July day. Men sat in the sunshine, weapons on their knees, talking and laughing. Lula and Junie had the babies on blankets to kick their fat little legs. Pretty sat combing her hair in full view of the lounging men. She had taken to sex like a squirrel to trees, and with Mike gone her list was due for variety.

  I didn’t ask anyone where the other girls were. Tiny and Seela would be playing together, under guard. Bonnie would be preparing medicinal plants, pounding leaves and boiling bark and drying berries. I slipped around the back of the Vivian Beaumont, pushed open the door to the underground corridor, and made my way in the dark to the theater. That door was locked. I pounded on it, and eventually Jemmy opened it.

  “Nurse—”

  I slapped him across the face and strode down the aisle.

  They were onstage and had not even heard me over the music. Over their intense concentration. Over their wonder, visible on both faces.

  Guy noticed me first. “Nurse!”

  Kara turned ashen and clutched what I now knew was called a barre. The boys must have brought it from the base building: a heavy-looking length of wood fastened not to a wall, as in the common room, but to heavy metal poles on either end. They had lugged the generator and the teevee down from the booth—I couldn’t imagine how—and installed both onstage. On the teevee the music abruptly stopped and the older woman said, “No, no—drop your right shoulder, Alicia!”

  Kara dropped her right shoulder.

  Guy’s face turned stony, such a good imitation of Mike that I was startled. I said, “What are you doing?”

  “We’re taking class.”

  Taking class. Following the movements of the dancers on the screen. All at once my anger was swamped by pity. They were so young. Growing up in such a barren world (my grandmother saying, “Such rich performances as I saw!”), but they hadn’t know how barren it was. Now they did, and they thought things could be changed.

  “Children, you can’t. If Mike ever finds out that you put your hands on a girl who hasn’t Begun—”

  “I didn’t touch her!” Guy said.

  “—you know you’d be shot. Instantly. Guy, think!”

  He came to the edge of the stage and knelt, looking down at me. “Nurse, I have to do this. I have to. And I can’t dance alone. ‘Ballet is woman.’ ”

  I had read that just last night. Some famous ballet maker whose name I had never heard. I said, “You stole my books.”

  “I borrowed one. It has pictures that—Nurse, I have to.”

  “So do I,” Kara said.

  “Kara, come with me this minute.”

  “No,” she said. Her defiance shocked me even more than their stupid notion that they could teach themselves to dance. I turned on Jemmy.

  “And what about you? Is this insane love of machinery worth getting yourself shot?”

  I saw from his face that Jemmy hadn’t even considered this. He looked from me to Guy, back again, then at the ground. I had him.

  “Go, Jemmy. Now. None of us will ever tell anyone you were here.”

  He scuttled down the aisle like a rabbit pursued by dogs. One misguided idiot down.

  “If Mike ever finds out you were alone with her—”

  “We’re not alone!” Kara said. “We have a chaperone!”

  “Who? If you mean Jemmy—”

  “Me,” Bonnie said, stepping from the shadows at the side of the stage.

  If Kara had been a shock, Bonnie was an earthquake. Bonnie, who did not break rules and who had always treated Kara with faint disdain: for her high-strung emotion, for her fragile beauty. Bonnie had no command over Guy, but she had a borrowed—from me—authority over Kara.

  “Bonnie? You allowed this?”

  Bonnie said nothing. In the dimness onstage I couldn’t see her face.

  “Nurse,” Guy said again, “we have to.”

  “No, you don’t. Kara, come with me.”

  “No.” And then, in a rush, “I won’t be like Pretty! I won’t let men touch me and sex with me and stick themselves up me until I get swollen and pregnant and maybe die like Emma did! I won’t, I won’t, I won’t!” Her voice rose to a shriek, surprising Guy. Kara had just broken the strongest rule among the pack: loyalty. You followed the chief, you obeyed those above you, you did not cause trouble. And you kept your fear to yourself.

  I made my voice soothing. “Kara, you heard what the woman on the teevee said. It takes years to become a real dancer. Years. This isn’t possible, dear heart.”

  “We know that,” Guy said. “We don’t be stupid enough to think we can do everything they do. But we can do some.”

  “And that’s worth dying for?”

  “Nobody will die if you tell Joe that you give us reading lessons here. Everybody knows Kara and me are learning to read off you!”

  “No,” I repeated. “It’s too great a risk, for nothing.”

  And then Bonnie—Bonnie!—spoke up. “Not for nothing. Nurse, first watch the dancing.”

  Guy seized on this. “Yes! Watch just once! It’s so beautiful!”

  It wasn’t beautiful. Kara and Guy took their places beside the railing, and he turned on Jemmy’s teevee. The woman said, “Battement tendu,” and Guy and Kara swung their legs forward, down, to the side, down, to the back down. Their legs reached neither the height nor the purity of line of the dancers on-screen, but they were not without grace. Guy showed a flexibility and power I had not expected, and Kara a flowing delicacy. None of it made any difference.

  They went through a few more steps and Guy turned off the screen. “We have to learn all we can before the generator fuel runs out. But we have the books, too. And later on in class there be combinations of steps!”

  Five window washers worked every day of the year, constantly keeping the windows bright. At night, when all the buildings were lit up, they shone out on the plaza like liquid gold. So little in this hard life was bright, and nothing was liquid gold. But not at risk of our lives.

  “No,” I said.

  Two days later, I fell in the forest—which I had learned from an old map was called “Central Park”—and tore my knee open on a pointed rock.

  “Oh!” The pain was immediate and sharp, but not as sharp as my fear. I was old; if I couldn’t walk when the pack moved on, I would be finished.

  Bonnie was instantly beside me. “Nurse?”

  I tried to rise, could not, was caught in her strong arms. I blinked back tears as we both stared at the white bone below my leathery flesh.

  Then I fainted.

  The sickroom under the New York State Theater, bare and dark, was no larger than a big closet. Lula sat beside me nursing Jaden, Madonna and child by a single smoky candle. “Grandmother . . .” I whispered, or maybe it was another word, I couldn’t be sure. Everything felt blurry, as if I’d opened my eyes underwater.

  “Nurse?” Lula said. She put down the baby, who immediately began to scream, and picked up a cup. “Here, drink this now, you be needing to sleep—”

  A smell of mint, a bitter taste beneath the sweetness of honey. I slept.

  The sickroom still, and I lay alone. Complete darkness. I groped for my leg and felt the hump of bandages, the wooden splint over the knee. Pain, muted. How long had I lain here?

  Hours went by until Bonnie came with breakfast, with hot tea, with her wooden, unrevealing face.

  “How bad is it, Bonnie? Will I walk again?”

  “Can’t say until you can stand.”

 
“Is Mike back?”

  “Not yet. Drink this.”

  “What is—”

  “Just tea.”

  I needed more than just tea. I needed to be able to walk.

  “Nurse? Nurse, you hear me?”

  I did, dragging myself back from far away, or maybe it was Pretty who was far away. Only she was not. She crouched beside me, except that now there were two of her, and then three. How could that be? One Pretty was enough. Unless she was fertile and had given birth to herself again and yet again . . .

  “I be pregnant!” one of the Prettys shouted triumphantly. And then: “Can she hear me?”

  “I don’t know,” Bonnie said.

  “It be Mike’s! I know! Bonnie, can she hear me?”

  “I don’t know.”

  And then, all of a sudden, I couldn’t.

  I was Grandmother, walking through Lincoln Center, watching the light spill from high arched windows, liquid gold. I took down twenty-one chandeliers and polished each crystal so bright that it burned my hand. The burning spread to the Library for the Performing Arts and charred it to the ground. Windows shattered and pieces of glass pierced me. “Lincoln Kirstein won’t like that!” my grandmother cried. “He spent a fortune to build this place!” I laughed and kept on tacking down red carpet.

  Finally, clarity returned. I knew who I was and where I was, and it was not Bonnie standing beside my bedroll but Joe, Mike’s lieutenant, who’d been left in charge for—how long now?

  “How be you, Nurse?” Joe said awkwardly.

  I had known Joe since he was ten. A ferocious fighter, loyal, careful about guarding our camps but easygoing about what happened within the perimeter. However, he didn’t look easy now.