Fictions

by Nancy Kress

  A woman rose and left, looking disappointed.

  “What we are seeking here predates all that codification, all organized belief systems. What we are seeking here is a primary and wordless way of knowing and interacting with the deeper reality of the universe. Not a religion but a wisdom. Many, many paths have been forged into this deeper reality. Shamans from every continent and every race have found paths to an inner awareness, a different consciousness. Buddhists, Taoists, Native American spirit walkers, Christian mystics, to name only a few. We will build on their practices.”

  Natalie nodded. Her mother always said that science built on the work of those who went before. Her mother harped on that endlessly: Walter Sutton, who located “particles of inheritance” on chromosomes, led to Oswald Avery led to Watson and Crick led to Nirenberg. Who knew that seeking did, too? It was reassuring.

  Through her shirt, she fingered her ancestor’s battered locket.

  THOU SHALT NOT KILL THE DATA

  Three months. For three months Andrea had been nursing along Michael’s quest. The Ramstetter/Ching study had come out in January, and now it was mid-April. New York was bursting with daffodils and tulips, and Andrea was bursting with frustration. Michael, she was afraid, was bursting with psychosis.

  They had gone over and over the Ramstetter/Ching data. And then over it again. Andrea had neglected her own research (although she knew in her secret heart that this was mostly because her own research was going nowhere and she would have to start a new line of attack, which she didn’t have). They had even run a small-scale replica of the Ramstetter/Ching, too small a data sample to be significant, but Andrea had to report soon to the Institute about something she was doing, and if their work had showed the Princeton results to be unreplicable . . . . Only it hadn’t. Their results perfectly matched the Ramstetter/Ching.

  Was that what sent Michael over the edge?

  Every week he looked worse. Weight melted off him like butter in the sun. Bags the size of small frogs sagged under his eyes. He yelled at lab assistants, one of whom quit in tears. By the third week in April, he had apparently stopped showering; he smelled. That was what determined Andrea to get tough with him. This was not depression—he was too animated for that—and it wasn’t science, either.

  The day she determined to do this, however, he did not come to work. He didn’t answer his phone or email. Wearily—her own day had not yielded anything useful about her stalled project—Andrea took the subway to his place on the Upper West Side. By 72nd Street, weariness had been replaced by fear. What if he had hanged himself in the closet, or gotten a gun. . . .

  This thought steadied her. Michael was so not a gun person. He even thought cops should go unarmed, like in England.

  Still, the rope in the closet. . . .

  By the time she reached Michael’s apartment, she was frantic. A sign said the bell was broken. She pounded on the door. “Michael! It’s me, Andrea! Open up! Michael!”

  He flung open the door, not only not dead but looking flushed and triumphant, dressed in a gorgeous bathrobe with a crest on the breast pocket, flourishing a printout.

  “You’re here! How great! I did it, I knew I could, I’m so glad you’re here, how did you know, it’s all over now, it’s so great you’re here!”

  Dazed, Andrea said, “What’s over? What have you done? Are you all right?”

  “I’m wonderful! I fixed those bastards good! No one will ever believe a word of that scurrilous study, or anything else those fuckers try to send against me! I have found it! I have vanquished my enemies!” He began to dance around the incredibly messy room, singing snatches of songs, talking talking talking.

  Gradually, from his chaotic spillage of words and her own questions (when he answered them), Andrea pieced it all together.

  What was wrong with Michael: he was in the intense manic phase of what, she now realized, looked like bipolar disease.

  Where the robe had come from: the box still lay on the floor beside her chair. He’d ordered it from Brunello Cucinelli. It was cashmere and cost $1,295. An act completely uncharacteristic of Michael, but not of mania.

  What Michael had found: ancient college records. Twenty-five years ago at Yale, Lucas Ramstetter had plagiarized a paper in a required English course. He’d been caught “falsifying his data” (Michael’s words) about the Cavalier poet Richard Lovelace, summoned to a dean’s hearing, and given an F for the course. Ramstetter had been nineteen.

  What Michael had done: written the most scurrilous letter that Andrea had ever seen, “exposing” Ramstetter, ending with a ringing denouncement that this man was no scientist because he did not honor truth, could not be trusted, was incapable of producing work not riddled with lies. Michael had sent the letter to Science , where the Ramstetter/Ching study was published; to the online forums in which genetic scientists discussed their work; to several listserves; to pages of Facebook; to Twitter.

  He danced around the living room, crushing decayed pizza boxes underfoot, old tomato sauce smearing his bare toes. He chanted Lovelace’s most famous lyric: “‘I could not love thee, Dear, so much, loved I not Honor more.’ Hah! Ramstetter has no honor! The fucker is not to be trusted! He . . . I . . . ” All at once he stopped and gazed at Andrea, the hem of the cashmere robe still flapping from his wild whirling, and said seriously, “I do love science, you know. It’s my god.”

  “I know,” Andrea said, and picked up the phone to call 911.

  THOU SHALT NOT ADULTERATE THE DATA

  Michael was taken to Bellevue and judged to be a danger to himself. When Andrea finally left him there, medication had quieted him, and his sister, the closest kin, was on her way from Massapequa. In the cab to her apartment, Andrea closed her eyes and let the tears come.

  Michael did love science. And now his career might be over. The Ramstetter/Ching data was good. You had to respect the data. Michael should never have tried to weaken it.

  At least, not by that methodology.

  THOU SHALT NOT STEAL

  Something had happened to Natalie, something so precious and important that for a whole month, she couldn’t talk about it, not even to Donald. And of course not to Kelly, whom Natalie disliked. Kelly was the kind of wispy, fake-feminine woman, all lipstick and pink ruffles (which BTW looked ridiculous on a woman her age) who somehow always got her way. Well, not with Natalie.

  For three months she had listened to Donald and Kelly. She had heard the studies of Tibetan monks that showed altered brain activity with meditation. She had practiced the kind of meditation the Flanagans taught. She had been intensely involved in finding her “indigenous spirituality,” free of gimmicks and codified externals and worldly distractions. She had tried to journey through territories of consciousness to arrive at wordless insights into the workings of the universe. She had tried to achieve the trance that was not a trance because while in it, you knew exactly who you were and what you were doing. She had tried to travel beyond the physical, into pure inner awareness. And she had failed.

  As a result of all this, plus of spending hours each night on the Internet reading about W. B. Yeats and the Sidhe, Thomas Merton and the Wisdom of Emptiness, Freud and his oceanic feeling, her grades at school had dropped precipitously. She got a D on the test on quadratic equations, her first D ever. Her art project of found-object collage had only one found object on it, a sparrow feather bedraggled from a winter under a snowbank. The Scarlet Letter remained unread. So far, her mother, who seemed preoccupied, knew none of this. However, report cards went home next week.

  “I think,” Donald said, “that you are still focusing on external things, Natalie. Try to detach yourself from everything tangible. I sense that you’re almost there.”

  Natalie didn’t feel almost there. She came home from iarrthóir on a wet April afternoon, slumped in a corner of a nearly empty train car. The car swayed rhythmically. Natalie closed her eyes, almost dozed. Her hand lifted, sleepily, to pull out and finger the locket.

  A
nd it happened.

  Suddenly she was no longer in the train. She was nowhere and everywhere, lifted out of herself. Later she would think of the experience as being “woven into the universe,” into what her science teacher called “the fabric of space-time,” but while it happened, there were no words. There was no Natalie, and yet there was. She was everything, and everything was her.

  Then it was over and she was sitting in a grimy Metro-North car, the locket warm in her fingers, the car slowing for Grand Central Station.

  “Oh,” Natalie breathed. ” Oh .” A strange analogy came to her, a remembered fragment of an overheard conversation among older girls in the school bathroom: If you don’t know if you’ve had an orgasm or not, you haven’t.

  Not sex, but . . . she had.

  That night, unable to sleep, she got out of bed and touched the locket. It felt cool. She tried and tried to replicate the experience, but nothing happened.

  * * *

  Andrea’s progress review with the Institute director was scheduled for Thursday, and she had nothing to show him. Her research was a dead end. That was something, of course—she knew how her central question could not be answered. But that had been the status of her work at her last review, and the one before that. If she hadn’t spent so much time chasing around with Michael on his research, she might have something to produce now.

  She pulled out Michael’s research notes and studied them yet again, although after all the agonizing over them with Michael, she’d practically memorized them. Yes, there was a piece of it that could also be incorporated into her project, at least enough to give it the appearance of forward motion. And maybe even more than that; they were working in the same field, after all. This section of data right here. . . .

  It wasn’t her section. It wasn’t her data.

  She needed to present something convincing to the director.

  Andrea chewed on her bottom lip, a habit she had abandoned two decades ago. Then she called a cab.

  At the rather pleasant psychiatric facility that the Institute insurance liberally covered (scientists were apparently prone to mental illness), she faced Michael across a table in the dayroom. A TV blared inanities having something to do with time travel. Michael, either heavily medicated or in the depressive phase of his illness, slumped in his chair and gazed at her from dull eyes. Finally he managed, “Hello, Andrea.”

  “Hello, Michael. How are you?”

  He stared at the tabletop and didn’t answer. Stupid question! It was obvious how he was. She decided—partly from compassion, partly from fear, and unable to tell the difference—to keep the interview short and professional.

  “Michael, my review is coming up soon and I haven’t made much progress with the project. There’s a section of your work I can incorporate into mine to . . . Michael? Are you listening?”

  “Yes.” He opened his eyes.

  “As I said, my review is coming up and—”

  “Review.” He said the word as if tasting it and finding the result sour. This gave her hope.

  “Yes, my review and—”

  “I’m very tired.”

  “Of course you are, but this will only take a moment, I promise. There’s a section of your data related to the . . . Michael?”

  “I’m listening,” he mumbled, but clearly he wasn’t. The effort to again open his eyes seemed to cost him the Earth.

  “Your data about the—”

  “Andrea,” he said, but not as if addressing her. Just testing who she was.

  She tried twice more, but she already knew. This man, her best friend, could not give informed consent to share his work, much less present it as her own. She rose, despair slithering up and down her throat, and kissed him on the top of his head.

  “It’s okay, Michael. You rest, and I’ll come back to visit Saturday.”

  He didn’t reply.

  On the subway home—no need now for the hurry of a cab, and failure didn’t deserve the expense—Andrea blinked back tears. For him, for her. For the world, stuck with fallible bodies, fallible brains, human meat that could betray anybody, anytime.

  * * *

  “No, dear, that’s nothing more than a trap,” Kelly said.

  “What?”

  “An attractive trap, which is why we fall for it so often. I’m sorry. You must keep seeking.”

  Natalie was confused. She’d burst into iarrthóir so eager to tell Donald about her experience that she’d tripped over the rough place in the floor of the old house. Donald wasn’t there, but Kelly, fussing and clucking, had produced iodine and a bandage. Natalie told her about what happened to her on the subway, even about the locket. And Kelly threw cold water on the whole thing.

  “You want to believe, Natalie, I know that. You truly are a seeker. But the things of this world are never doorways to the deeper reality—how can they be, when they have form and histories and names? The inner awareness has no form, no words, is without history because it is timeless. The territories of consciousness are not navigated via lockets. You loved your grandmother and so your mind—so eager! So desirous!—gave you this illusion about your locket. But it is an illusion. It happens often on the way to true awareness, if that’s any comfort.”

  It wasn’t. Natalie hated her. She looked at Kelly, who was smiling maternally (although Natalie’s own mother, whatever her faults, never looked so condescending). Natalie hated Kelly’s smile, her butter-yellow sweater, her bright pink lipstick, the little curls around her forehead. Probably Kelly set her hair .

  She said, “I want to talk to Donald.”

  Kelly’s face closed. “Of course, dear.”

  But when Donald came in half an hour later, he said essentially the same thing.

  And they were wrong.

  She picked up her jeans jacket, said, “Thanks for the bandage,” and walked out of iarrthóir for the last time.

  Because it had happened. Natalie hadn’t needed all the research she’d done in the middle of the night on the “power objects” to tell her that. Over millennia, shamans had used solid things to reach awareness—a stone, jaguar’s tooth, rattle, feather. Natalie knew her experience was real because it had happened to her , through her great-great-whatever-grandmother’s locket with whatever was sealed inside. She had sought, and found, and for a moment she had been woven into the universe, warp to its woof, wordlessly knowing everything that mattered.

  THOU SHALT NOT BEAR FALSE WITNESS

  Andrea got home to find the mail piled deep beneath the door slot. Among the bills and ads and cultural notices was the envelope with Natalie’s report card.

  Andrea’s review with the director had been a disaster. For the third time in eighteen months, she had been unable to produce anything, and Dr. Kinter had been “very disappointed.” “Very disappointed” was bad, worse than “patient” (the first review without progress) or “puzzled” (the second). “Very disappointed” was one review and another six months from “unsustainable,” as in “Get your ass out of here.” After the review, Andrea had gone straight to the Ladies’ and stayed there for twenty minutes.

  She was in no mood for Natalie’s report card.

  “You have a D in algebra! I thought you liked algebra!”

  “I don’t value algebra.”

  “What does that mean? Math is the foundation, the basic tool to understand the universe! And your English teacher said you couldn’t answer one question about The Scarlet Letter ! Not one! You didn’t even read it!”

  “It’s a stupid book,” Natalie said.

  “How do you know it’s a stupid book if you didn’t even read it?”

  And then Natalie turned into someone else. Her face darkened, she grew taller, rage rose off her like heat. “Don’t pounce on me with that stupid logic! Just don’t do it! Fuck, Mom, you’re so . . . so . . . just stop pouncing !”

  Andrea saw that she’d handled this badly. Natalie was deeply upset about something else, which Andrea should have seen, would have seen if her own
emotions weren’t so roiled up about the review, about Michael, about her futile work. Andrea fought for control. She was the adult here, she had to approach Natalie with sensitivity.

  Natalie was beyond approach with anything at all. She screamed, “And I did so read The Scarlet Letter ! Dimmesdale fucks her and he dies—there! Are you satisfied! I read it after the test but you’re always telling me the point of education is to broaden my mind and not be measured by stupid tests and now you just changed your whole position and . . . and . . . you’ve been awful lately because your work is going bad or something but don’t you dare take it out on me!”

  Andrea, trying to defuse the situation by keeping it free of irrelevancies, said, “My work is going fine. Natalie, honey—”

  “I read every last word of The Scarlet Letter !” Natalie yelled, lying at a decibel level that rivaled a jackhammer. She ran into her room and slammed the door.

  THOU SHALT NOT COVET

  An hour later, Andrea knocked quietly. An hour was overkill—usually Natalie calmed down in about forty minutes—but Andrea wanted to be sure. Natalie opened the door.

  “I’m sorry I exploded at you,” Andrea said.

  “I’m sorry, too,” Natalie said. Andrea expected that Natalie would have been crying, but her eyes were steady and clear. She fingered some sort of ugly jewelry on a long chain around her neck. Andrea had seen the chain before, of course, protruding above Natalie’s collar, but she’d thought it probably held a sports ring or a trinket from some boy, which Natalie would show her when she was ready. But if a boy had given her that misshapen bit of tin, he was really cheap.

  Andrea said, “What’s that, honey?” Talk about neutral things first, before tackling her daughter’s grades. If this kept up, there went Natalie’s chances at a decent college. The young just never realized what was important in the long run.

  Natalie hesitated. The hesitation went on so long that Andrea was about to say, “That’s all right, you don’t have to tell me,” when Natalie said, “I think I want to tell you.”