by Marge Piercy
Large platters of food passed from hand to hand: a corn-bread of coarse-grained meal with a custard layer and a crusty, wheaty top; butter not in a bar but a mound, pale, sweet and creamy; honey in an open pitcher, dark with a heady flavor. The soup was thick with marrow beans, carrots, pale greens she could not identify, rich in the mouth with a touch of curry. In the salad were greens only and scallions and herbs, yet it was piquant, of many leaves blended with an oil tasting of nuts and a vinegar with a taste of … sage? Good food, good in the mouth and stomach. Pleasant food.
Luciente was saying everyone’s name, leaving her battered. Nobody seemed to have more than one. “Don’t you have last names?”
“When we die?” Barbarossa, a man with blue eyes and a red beard, raised his eyebrows at her. “We give back with the name we happen to have at that time.”
“Surnames. Look, my name is Consuelo Ramos. Connie for short. Consuelo is my Christian name, my first name. Ramos is my last name. When I was born I was called Consuelo Camacho. Ramos is the name of my second husband: therefore I am Consuelo Camacho Ramos.” She left out Álvarez, the name of her first husband, Martin, for simplicity.
They looked at each other, several adults and children consulting the kenners on their wrists. Finally Luciente said, “We have no equivalent.”
She felt blocked. “I suppose you have numbers. I guess you’re only called by first names because your real name—your identification—is the number you get at birth.”
“Why would we be numbered? We can tell each other apart.” The tall intense young person was staring at her. Jackrabbit, Luciente had said: therefore male. He had a lot of very curly light brown hair and he wore the sleeves of his pale blue work shirt rolled up to expose several bracelets of hand-worked silver and turquoise on each wiry arm.
“But the government. How are you identified?”
“When I was born, I was named Peony by my mothers—”
“Peony sounds like a girl’s name.”
“I don’t understand. It was the name chosen for me. When I came to naming, I took my own name. Never mind what that was. But when Luciente brought me down to earth after my highflying, I became Jackrabbit. You see. For my long legs and my big hunger and my big penis and my jumps through the grass of our common life. When Luciente and Bee have quite reformed me, I will change my name again, to Cat in the Sun.” He produced on his thin face a perfect imitation of Luciente’s orange cat squeezing its eyes shut. “But why have two names at one time? In our village we have only one Jackrabbit. When I visit someplace else, I’m Jackrabbit of Mattapoisett.”
“You change your name any time you want to?”
“If you do it too often, nobody remembers your name,” Barbarossa said solemnly in his schoolmaster’s manner. “Sometimes youths do that the first years after naming.”
The old brown-skinned … woman?—it confused Connie to be so unsure—introduced as Sojourner was giggling. “They’re always trying out fancy new labels every week till no one can call them anything but Hey you or Friend. It slows down by and by.”
“All right—you have those things on your wrist. Somewhere there’s a big computer. How does it recognize you?”
“My own memory annex is in my kenner,” Luciente said. “With transport of encyclopedia, you just call for what you want.”
“But what about the police? What about the government? How do they keep track of you if you keep changing names?”
Again a great buzz of confusion and kenner checking passed around the table, with half of them turning to each other instead.
“This is complicated!” The old woman Sojourner shook her head. “Government I think I grasp. Luciente can show you government, but nobody’s working there today.”
“Maybe next time. I will try to study up on this, but it’s very difficult,” Luciente moaned.
“We should all study to help Luci,” a child said.
“In the meantime, maybe you could ask something easier? You said something about the paintings?”
“It doesn’t matter. I just thought it was funny you put up the kids’ stuff. I mean everybody wants to look at their own kid’s pictures, but nobody wants to look at anybody else’s.”
A slight blond man, Morningstar, peered into her face with puzzlement. “But they’re all ours.”
“We change the panels all the time,” Jackrabbit said. “For instance, say I make one and later it stales on me. I make a new one. Or if everybody tires of one, we discuss and change. I did that whole big river namelon on the east, cause people wanted.”
Luciente put down her fork. “What’s wrong, Connie?”
“Connie’s worn out,” Jackrabbit said. “Strangers, every lug asking questions, holding the contact. You imagine there’s no energy drain in catching.”
Luciente put an arm around her. “You look gutted. Remember this food will not sustain.”
“Why not?” She felt thick with fatigue and the room swayed. “I can taste it.”
“As in dreams. You experience through me … . We better go back.”
“Finish your lunch first.” The voices seemed to drift around her and her eyelids drooped.
“This exhaustion worries me. I must teach you exercises—”
“Not here. Can’t think. Too many people.”
“Come! Give me your arm. We’ll visit again. This is only a false spring, a January thaw of beginning. Back you go.”
She felt leaden, her feet wading through loose sand. As they shuffled out, Luciente looked worried. Standing at last on the stone walk, Connie mumbled, “Clothing. Must change.”
“Your body is where it was, unchanged in dress. Understand, you are not really here. If I was knocked on the head and fell unconscious, say into full nevel, you’d be back in your time instantly … .” Luciente drew her into the firm embrace with their foreheads touching. She was too spent to do more than fall into Luciente’s concentration as into a fast stream, the waters churning her under. She came to propped against the wall of the seclusion room. The tears had dried on the sleeve of her faded dress. She lay down at once on the bare, piss-stained mattress and fell asleep.
FOUR
Spring in the violent ward was only more winter, except for a little teasing of the eyeballs when she stood at the high, heavily barred window. The radiators still pumped blasts of heat into the air that the smell of disinfectant and stale bodies turned into a foul broth. Pain and terror colored the air of Ward L-6. Pain silvered the air; when she was lurching into drugged sleep, pain sloshed over from the other beds. Yet spring finally came to Ward L one April Wednesday.
She was sitting near the station, hoping to do some little job to cadge cigarettes. As one of the functional patients, she got on with the attendants, except for an evil redheaded racist bitch on weekends, and with one of them, Ms. Fargo, she got on well. Ms. Fargo was close to her in color and size and age, but black and free—as free as any woman making that kind of wage with six kids at home could be called free.
“I like the Ms. thing,” Fargo told her with a big gap-toothed grin. “‘Cause I got six kids and no man steady, and that puts me ass first to how it supposed to be. Ms. do me fine.”
Fargo talked to her almost humanly. When Fargo was working, she often waited around near the glassed-in station and sometimes Fargo would ask her to sweep the floor or take a woman to the bathroom or hold a patient for an injection or sit with a patient coming out of electroshock. Then Fargo would give her extra cigarettes.
She hated being around the shock shop. It scared her. Regularly some patients from L-6 were wheeled out for shock. One morning there would be no breakfast for you, and then you would know. They would wheel you up the hall and inject you to knock you out and shoot you up with stuff that turned your muscles to jelly, so that even your lungs stopped. You were a hair from death. You entered your death. Then they would send voltage smashing through your brain and knock your body into convulsions. After that they’d give you oxygen and let you come back
to life, somebody’s life, jumbled, weak, dribbling saliva—come back from your scorched taste of death with parts of your memory forever burned out. A little brain damage to jolt you into behaving right. Sometimes it worked. Sometimes a woman forgot what had scared her, what she had been worrying about. Sometimes a woman was finally more scared of being burned in the head again, and she went home to her family and did the dishes and cleaned the house. Then maybe in a while she would remember and rebel and then she’d be back for more barbecue of the brain. In the back wards the shock zombies lay, their brains so scarred they remembered nothing, giggling like the old lobotomized patients.
On that Wednesday she was sitting there hopefully, but Fargo was deep in gossip with another black attendant. Connie had gone up once for a light—the only way inmates could get a match was to beg for one—and had been told to wait a minute, honey, half an hour ago. Four other patients were waiting too with small requests. She knew better than to approach again. On her lap was spread yesterday’s paper, a present from Fargo for cleaning up vomit, but she had read through it, including births and deaths and legal notices. Mrs. Martínez approached her, eyes meeting hers and then downcast in a gesture that reminded her suddenly of Luciente’s orange cat. Several weeks had passed since she had been in contact with the future, although almost daily she felt Luciente’s presence asking to be let through. Here in the violent ward she was afraid to allow contact, for she had to watch her step. She was never alone, not even in the toilets without doors, never away from surveillance.
Mrs. Martinez stood almost in front of her but a little to one side and fixed her eyes longingly on the newspaper, met her gaze questioningly, then glanced away. For months Mrs. Martínez had not spoken. The attendants treated her as a piece of furniture. Many of the withdrawn had their own ways of speaking without words to anyone who was open, and Connie never had much trouble figuring out what Mrs. Martinez wanted. She handed over the paper. “Sure, I’m done reading it. But give it back, okay? For me to sit on.” A paper like that made a good pillow and she had no intention of abandoning it.
Mrs. Martínez smiled, her eyes thanked Connie, and carefully, as if bearing off a baby, she took the paper away to the corner to pore over. Connie determined to keep an eye on Martinez and make sure nobody strong-armed the paper from her. Martinez would long ago have been transferred from this acute ward to a chronic ward and left to rot there, except that her husband was on a D.A.’s staff and came up to see her the last Sunday in every month with her children—never allowed inside, although she would stand at the window and weep and weep and hold out her hands to them. He would sign her out for holidays, but always, after a month or two, he would bring her back.
Connie was watching Martinez turn the pages slowly, when two orderlies brought in a woman handcuffed to a stretcher, trundling her past roaring muffled protest. A sheet was tied over her and only her hair was visible, long auburn hair clotted now with fresh blood. Her voice rose out of the sheet, her voice soared like a furious eagle flapping auburn wings.
“Sybil!” Connie cried out and half rose. Then she shut up. Give nothing away. She watched them wrestle Sybil into seclusion and heard the thump as they threw her against the wall. Her tall, bony body would be snapping its vertebrae, bucking with rage, until the dose took and she could no longer move.
Sitting quietly, Connie clasped her hands in her lap. Sybil was here. A slow warmth trickled through her. She had been lonely here, for few of the women on L-6 had energy left to relate, in their anguish of dealing with mommy, daddy, death, and the raw stuff of fear. She hoped the orderlies had not beaten her friend badly and that Sybil would simmer down and get out of seclusion soon. She had to try to get a message to Sybil through the locked door. Patients were not allowed to communicate with those in the isolation cells.
Her last time here they had met, and in the strange twilit childhood of the asylum with its advancements and demotions, its privileges and punishments, its dreary air of grade school, they had twice been confined in the same ward long enough to become friends. Each patient rose and dropped through the dim rings of hell gaining and losing privileges, sent down to the violent wards, ordered to electroshock, filed away among the living cancers of the chronic wards, rewarded by convalescent status, allowed to do unpaid housework and go to dance therapy; but twice they had come to rest on the same step and they had talked and talked and talked their hearts to each other.
Patience was the only virtue that counted here. “Patients survive on patience,” she imagined embroidering on a little sampler, like “Dios Bendiga Nuestro Hogar.” A week wormed through her soul before they let Sybil on the ward.
That morning she sat away from the station for privacy. When Sybil entered, looking tall and drawn, Connie did not greet her except with her eyes. It did not do to presume too much or to impose. Sometimes the mad behaved toward each other with delicate courtesy. She did not want to intrude on a desperate inner battle or mind loop. Sybil met her gaze, strolled the length of the ward in wary reconnaissance, then let her long body down beside her.
“Hi, old darling! When shall we two meet again? In thunder, lightning, or in rain?”
“It looks like a good day to me, Sybil, seeing you again.”
“We’re two witches, I mean. With a coven, think what we could do!”
Sybil really did think she was a witch, that she could heal with herbs, that she could cast spells both black and white. They’d had an argument last time about those names. Connie had told Sybil that black magic for bad and white for good were racist terms. Finally Sybil had agreed to name the magics red, for blood vengeance, and green, for growing and healing. She wondered if Sybil remembered, or if she had gone back to the old names.
“How long you been in this time? Do you know?” she asked.
“I just arrived. I was hexing a judge.” Sybil held up her bony elegant hands with white marks for the rings she wore, which they always took from her over her roaring protests. “They take them because they sense how potent my rings are. They’re in a microwave oven, being bombarded with rays to destroy the power in them. When I recover them, it takes me weeks to restore their strength.” Gently Sybil touched a lock of Connie’s hair. “Did you just get here?”
She smiled at Sybil and began to tell her the story. “This time I did nothing I’m ashamed for—though like you hexing judges, maybe it wasn’t so smart for me to fight.” Her telling took them through the supper lines and the supper of what Sybil pronounced Toad Stew, through the evening medication line and the blank space of time until lights out.
“Tomorrow is your turn to bring me up to date.”
“Oh, that will take at least a week,” Sybil promised.
Sybil was her best woman friend except for Dolly, who was blood, but because she lived in Albany they never managed to see each other outside the hospital. Oh, Sybil was crazy, but Connie had no trouble talking to her. Sybil was persecuted for being a practicing witch, for telling women how to heal themselves and encouraging them to leave their husbands, for being lean and crazily elegant and five feet ten in her bare long high-arched feet, for having a loud, penetrating voice and a back that would not stoop and a temper that stood up in her, lashing the tail of a lioness. Sybil did not hesitate to take to her fists against anyone, so she had a scar across her high-domed forehead coming down to take a white bite of her left eyebrow. Sybil had lost a front tooth and she had a little bald spot she could find when she wanted to show Connie where her hair had been pulled out by an attendant, the time before the time before last when she had been forcibly committed.
Why did she like Sybil so much? Her heart warmed when she saw Sybil’s long body writhing in fury. Sybil had high carved cheekbones and a square jaw, a haughty nose and eyes of a smoky umber. On the outside she wore outrageous makeup and ringed her eyes with black, but inside they would not let her near her precious kohl. Mainly, Sybil was a fighter and she fought those who threatened her, instead of hating her own self. She didn’t d
eny herself, she had not sold herself to any man. Connie adored the way she fought and wouldn’t give up or go under and wouldn’t be broken—not yet. All she could give anyone in here was to have survived this far, this long.
They talked passionately, sitting side by side against a wall, sometimes interrupting the flow by half an hour or an hour, sometimes muttering out of the sides of their mouths as if they were kids talking in school. Too much animation, too obvious a pleasure in each other’s company would bring down punishment. The hospital regarded Sybil as a lesbian. Actually she had no sex life.
“Who wants to be a hole?” Sybil asked her. “Do you want to be a dumb hole people push things in or rub against? As for sex, it reminded me of going to the dentist the only time I indulged. Now, when you look at it clearly from the outside, Consuelo, with some measure of detachment, you see how perfectly futile”—few-tile, she pronounced it, loving vowel sounds—“futile it all appears, and how sordid besides.”
“But people do it ail the time, Sybil.” She was grinning. “Must be something in it, no?”
“Consuelo!” Sybil pronounced her name carefully and with a reasonable effort at the Spanish. “People play rummy and hearts and we both know how tedious those pastimes are. People put together jigsaw puzzles too. The attendants like it if you work jigsaw puzzles; they think that’s relating to reality, the poor boobs. Everybody who is presently touching”—their word for the state when inmates were responsive to things outside them—“has read every word of that newspaper under you. I know you have too, even the sports pages, although you can’t tell tennis from football!”
“It’s true, when a person is bored they … want to go to bed more. It’s like the jokes about the long winter night of the Eskimo. When you have nothing to do, you, yourself, are your own plaything. Look at all the … fooling around that goes on here.”
