by Dan Simmons
“Beat it, pal,” he snapped, flicking his hand dismissively as the wino came within panhandling distance. The man had a wild, blond beard, wilder eyes behind tape-patched glasses, and was wearing a full raincoat despite the heat of the day. The wino did not move away.
He shook his head and moved to go around the wino.
“In a hurry?” asked the bum, his throat thick with phlegm. It was as if the man had not spoken for days.
“Fuck off,” he said, and turned toward the bus station.
Suddenly he was jerked backward, into the shadows of the stairs. He whirled around, pulling his suit free of the wino’s filthy fist. “What the fuck …” he began.
“Hurrying home to abuse Bonnie?” said the wino in a soft rasp. “Going to do it to her again tonight?”
He stared, jaw slack. A cold claw slid down his back. He felt sweat drip from his armpit and trickle downward under his blue oxford-cloth buttondown. “What?”
“You heard me, asshole. We know all about it. Everyone does. The police probably know, too. They’re probably waiting with Carla in your kitchen right now, asshole.”
He continued to stare, feeling the shock turn to pure anger and begin to burn like white kerosene. Whoever this mangy fuck was, however he … however he knew … he was six inches shorter and eighty pounds lighter. He could kill this wino fuck with one hand tied behind his back.…
“Why don’t you try to kill me then, child molester?” whispered the wino. Amazingly, the stairway and bit of sidewalk below it were still empty. The shadows were long.
“Goddamn fucking right I’ll …” he began, and stopped as the flame of anger grew stronger, then blossomed into an explosion of pure hate as the wino began grinning through his tangled beard at him. He balled his large hands into fists and took three steps toward the bum, telling himself to stop just short of killing the little fuck. He had almost killed the kid back in college. He’d try to stop before the wino fuck quit breathing, but it would feel so good to sink his fists into that scabby, filthy face.…
Jeremy Bremen took a step back as the man rushed him, fists rising. Bremen reached under his raincoat, swept out the two-by-four, and brought it around in a left-handed swing that had helped him bat .287 during his last year of college ball.
In the last possible second the man’s arms had come up to shield his face. Bremen smashed the long board into the man’s upper arms, again into his shoulders as he went down on the stairs.
The big man snarled something and struggled to his feet. Bremen hit him once in the solar plexus with the board and then smashed it over the back of the man’s head as he doubled over. He began rolling down the steps in awkward little jerks.
Someone near the bus terminus began shouting. Bremen did not look over his shoulder. Taking his time, he stepped closer, hefted the three-foot length of board still in his hand, and swung it like a golf club, the swing ending in the big man’s open mouth. Teeth caught the last of the sunlight as they arced out over the street.
The big man spat, sat up, raised his forearms to his face.
“This is for Bonnie,” said Bremen, or tried to say through his clenched jaws, and then he swung down, very hard, smashing the end of the board into the man’s crotch.
The big man screamed. Someone down the walking mall screamed.
Bremen stepped forward and smashed the board into the man’s head again, splintering the wood a final time. The big man began to topple forward; Bremen stepped back and kicked him, once, very hard, imagining his groin as a football held at a perfect angle for a field goal.
Somewhere close by on Larimer Street a siren wailed and fell back into silence. Bremen stepped back, let the last shard of splintered wood fall from his grubby hands, looked once at the whimpering man on the sidewalk, and turned and ran.
There were shouts and the sound of at least two people running after him.
Raincoat flying, beard flapping, eyes so wide that they appeared to be blank, white eggs set in a dirt-browned face, Bremen ran for the shadows of the railroad overpass.
EYES
Gail and Jeremy want a child.
At first, during the year or so that is their extended honeymoon, it is assumed that a child will come along soon enough, so Gail takes precautions against an unwanted pregnancy—first the Pill, then a diaphragm when health worries arise. Eighteen months after their wedding they agree to discontinue the diaphragm and to let nature take its course.
For another eight months or so there are no worries. Their lovemaking is frequent and still passionate and the making of a baby is secondary in their thoughts. Then Gail begins to worry. They did marry somewhat late … Jeremy was twenty-seven and Gail twenty-five … but her doctor assures her that she has ten years of prime reproductive time ahead of her. But three years after the wedding, a week after Jeremy’s thirtieth birthday—celebrated by having friends from the college come over for a day of softball—Gail suggests that they both see specialists.
At first Jeremy is surprised. She has shielded her concern from him as well as she could conceal anything; which is to say, he had known it was there but had underestimated the strength of it. Now, lying in bed together on a summer night, the moonlight streaming between the lace curtains, both of them listening to the insects and night-bird sounds out behind the barn during the pauses in their conversation, they decide that it is time to check things out.
First Jeremy goes through the slightly embarrassing ritual of providing semen for a sperm count. The doctor’s office is in Philadelphia and is part of a modern complex with a discreet sign on the service elevator: GENETIC COUNSELING SERVICES. At least ten doctors work out of the complex, trying to help infertile couples realize their dream of parenthood. The reality of it all is sobering to both Gail and Jeremy, but they laugh together when Jeremy has to go to the rest room to provide his “specimen.”
Jeremy sends the visual: copies of Penthouse, The Girls of Playboy, and half a dozen other glossy, soft-core magazines sit in a plastic magazine-holder on the counter near the toilet. A small typed message on a folded card next to the stack reads: Due to the expense of replacing missing magazines, we must ask that you not remove these periodicals from this room.
In the small room where she is waiting for her doctor, Gail begins giggling. Can I watch?
Go away.
Are you kidding? And miss this fascinating vicarious experience? I may pick up some pointers.
I’ll give you a pointer … a sharp stick in the eye if you don’t leave me alone here. This is serious.
Yes … serious. Gail is actively working to stifle her giggles now. Jeremy can see the image she has of her doctor entering the examination room to find his patient doubled over with mirth, tears streaming down her face. Serious, sends Gail, and then, looking through Jeremy’s eyes at the photos in the first magazine he picked up: My heavens, how can those young women pose like that? She begins giggling again.
Irritated, Jeremy does not answer. He finds the conversation distracting. He turns the pages.
Having a little trouble, Jerry?
Go away. He closes the magazine and sighs.
Let me help. She pulls a screen between herself and the door and begins undressing, watching herself in a full-length wall mirror as she does so.
Hey! What the heck are you …
Gail undoes the last button on her blouse and folds it carefully over the back of the chair. She gestures toward a hospital gown laid out on the examining table. The doctor’s nurse said that there would be an examination.
Listen …
Hush, Jerry. Read your magazine. Jeremy sets the magazine back on the stack and closes his eyes.
Gail Bremen is a small woman, only five feet two inches tall in her stocking feet, but her body is classically proportioned, strong, and sensual in the extreme. She smiles into the mirror at Jeremy and he thinks, not for the first time, that her smile is a large part of that sensuality. The only woman’s smile that he has seen that is similar in such an e
ngaging, provocative, but overall wholesome way is that of the gymnast Mary Lou Retton. Gail’s smile has the same irrepressible involvement of jaws and lips and perfect teeth; it is an invitation to some small mischief that communicates directly to the observer.
Gail senses his thoughts and quits smiling, feigning a frown and squinting at him. Don’t mind me. Get on with whatever you were doing.
Idiot.
She flashes the grin again and slips out of her black skirt and slip, setting both on the chair. In her simple bra and underpants Gail seems both vulnerable and infinitely alluring. She reaches to unfasten her bra with that unself-conscious feminine grace that never fails to stir Jeremy. The slight hunching of her shoulders brings her breasts closer together as the fabric over them goes slack and slides away. Gail sets the bra on the chair and peels off the white pants.
Still watching?
Jeremy is still watching. He is touched in an almost religious way at how attractive his wife is. Her hair is dark and short, parted so that it falls across her high forehead in a soft curve. Her eyebrows are thick and dark—Annette Funicello eyebrows, she once had ruefully called them—but they add a dramatic highlight to her hazel eyes. An artist who had drawn her portrait with pastels some years before on a summer outing to Monhegan Island had said to Jeremy, who was watching: “I’ve read about eyes being luminous, but I always thought that was a bullshit word. Until now. Sir, your lady has luminous eyes.”
Gail’s facial features somehow manage to be both fine and strong: finely chiseled cheekbones, strong nose, fine laugh lines around those luminous eyes, a strong chin, and a fine complexion that shows the slightest hint of sun or embarrassment. She shows no embarrassment now, although there is a hint of red high on her cheekbones as she tosses her underpants onto the chair and stands a second before the mirror.
Jeremy Bremen has never been overly attracted by female breasts. Perhaps it was the ease with which he had eavesdropped on girls’ thoughts during his adolescence, perhaps it is his penchant to look at the entire equation—or in this case, organism—rather than at its constituent parts, but since he passed that inevitable sexual crisis of his adolescence, breasts have seemed a normal enough part of the human anatomy to him. Attractive, yes … a constant source of sexual stimulation, no.
Gail’s breasts are an exception. They are large for someone her height, but it is not their size that so stirs him. The girls in the magazines laid out nearby to help the sperm donors tend to have huge breasts, but the proportions as often as not seem wrong or downright silly to Jeremy. Gail’s breasts are …
Jeremy shakes his head, finding that he cannot put some things in words, even to himself.
Try.
Gail’s breasts are sensual in the extreme. While proportionate to her athlete’s body and strong back, they are … perfect is the only word that Bremen can think of: high but heavy with the promise of touch, much paler than the rest of her tanned skin—small veins are visible under the white near where the tan line ends—and tipped with areolae that have remained as pink as a young girl’s. Her nipples rise only slightly in the cool air, and now her breasts are compressed and raised again as Gail unconsciously hugs herself against the chill, the dark hairs on her forearm visible against the white, weighty undercurve of breast.
Gail’s gaze does not shift, but Jeremy allows himself to change his own perspective on her image in the mirror, thinking to himself as he does so: I’m seeing my mind’s reflection of her mind’s view of her reflection. A ghost admiring ghost shadows.
Gail’s hips are wide but not too wide, her thighs strong, the V of dark hair between them rising to the cusp of her belly with all the bushy fullness promised by her dark eyebrows and the shadowed stipple under her arms. Her knees and lower legs are elegant not only in an athlete’s honest way, but in the classical proportions of the finest sculptures of Donatello. Jeremy lowers his gaze and wonders why men ever abandoned their fascination with such a sexually stimulating series of arcs and curves as those that constitute such a slim ankle as this.
Gail sets the screen aside, slips her left arm in the gown—no standard hospital gown this, but an expensive artifact of combed cotton for the upscale clientele—and pauses, half-turned from him, her left breast and hip catching the soft light filtering through the Venetian blinds above. Still having problems, Jerry? A smile. No, I see you’re not.
Shut up, please.
He hears the doctor’s footsteps beyond her door, then their mindshields raise together, not shutting off their sharing but muting it a bit.
Jeremy does not open his eyes.
I have to intervene here to say that my first glimpse of this open sexual feeling between Jeremy and Gail was a revelation for me. Literally a revelation; an awakening of almost religious dimensions. It opened new worlds for me, new systems of thought and understanding.
I had known sexual pleasures, of course … or at least the pleasures of friction. The sadness following orgasm. But these physical responses were nothing out of the context of the shared love and sexual intimacy that Jeremy and Gail had known.
My awe at discovering this aspect of the universe could not have been greater had I been a scientist who stumbled upon the Grand Unified Theory of the cosmos. In a real sense the love and sex between Gail and Jeremy was the Grand Unified Theory of the cosmos.
Jeremy’s sperm count is fine. His part of the testing is over.
Not so Gail. Over the next nine months she undergoes entire batteries of tests—some painful, most embarrassing, all fruitless. She suffers a laparoscopy and repeated ultrasound exams that seek for tubal blockage, uterine abnormalities, fibroid tumors, ovarian cysts, uterine lesions, and endometriosis. None is found. She is tested for hormone deficiencies and sperm-rejecting antibodies. None is confirmed. She is put on Clomid and sent out to buy ovulation predictor kits—at significant expense each month—so that the peak days and hours of fertility can be determined. Gail and Jeremy’s sex life begins to resemble a military campaign; for three or four twenty-four-hour periods each month, the day begins with urine tests on chemically treated paper and ends with multiple bouts of intercourse followed by a time where Gail rests on her back with her hips slightly elevated and legs bent at the knee so that the slowly swimming sperm have the best chance possible of finishing their trek.
Nothing. Nine months of nothing; then another six months of the same.
Gail and Jeremy see three other specialists. In each case Jeremy is cleared on the basis of his single sperm-count test and Gail undergoes another series of tests. She becomes an expert at knowing precisely when she must drink the half gallon of water so that she can last through the ultrasound without wetting her hospital gown.
The tests continue to show nothing, satisfy nothing. Gail and Jeremy continue to try, eventually abandoning the daily charts and test kits for fear of destroying all spontaneity. The possibility of artificial insemination is raised and they agree to think about it, but they silently dismiss that option before leaving the clinic. If sperm and egg are all right, if Gail’s reproductive system is all right, they would rather leave things to chance and the natural system of things.
The natural system of things fails them. For the next few years Gail and Jeremy continue to dream of having children, but quit talking about it. Even Gail’s musings on the subject while they are in mindtouch can send them both into a depression. Occasionally, when Gail would be holding a friend’s newborn, Jeremy is shocked to feel her reaction to the infant’s touch and scent; her heart aches with longing … he understands that … but her entire body also responds: breasts hurting and womb seeming to throb with a physical reaction to the newborn. It is a response beyond Jeremy’s experience and he marvels that two forms of human beings—male and female—can inhabit the same planet, speak the same language, and assume they can have anything in common while such basic and profound differences silently separate them.
Gail is aware of Jeremy’s desire for children, but also of his reservations
about having one of their own. She has always seen these snippets of concern in his mind: fear of birth defects, hesitation at introducing another heart and mind into the perfect two-point constellation that is their relationship, a basic jealousy that anyone or anything else could fill Gail’s attention and affection the way he does now.
She has seen these concerns, but dismissed them as typical male hesitations about having children. But what she has missed is important.
Jeremy is terrified of having an imperfect child. In the beginning of their ordeal, when pregnancy seemed only a few weeks or months away, he would lie awake at night and catalog his fears.
Just from his brief work on genetics and probability in college he knew some of the possible outcomes of this roll of the genetic dice: Down’s syndrome, Huntington’s chorea, Tay-Sachs disease, hemophilia … the list goes on. And Jeremy had known the odds even before the doctor spoke to them that first time: a one-percent chance that a couple will have a child with a serious or life-threatening birth defect. At age twenty Gail ran a 1:2,000 chance of having a child with Down’s syndrome and a 1:526 risk of some sort of major chromosomal disorder. If they wait until Gail is thirty-five, the odds shift to 1:300 for Down’s syndrome and 1:179 for a significant chromosomal abnormality. By age forty the probability curve has become a steep and slippery slope: 1:100 for Down’s and a 1:63 chance of having other serious defects.
The possibility of having a retarded or malformed child freezes Jeremy with horror. The inevitability of any child changing his relationship with Gail produces horror on a less urgent but equally disturbing plane. Gail has seen the former and dismissed it; she catches only the faintest reflection of Jeremy’s terror at the second possibility. He shields it from her—and from himself—as best he can, using misdirection and the static jamming of his mindshield during their telepathic sharing when the subject arises. It is one of only two secrets that he holds from Gail through their entire time together.
