by Nancy Kress
God said, “I can’t just—”
I held up my hand placatingly, “I know, I know—you can’t just compromise your artistic integrity. And nobody’s asking you to. Just be a little more consistent in tone and imagery.”
God said, “No, you don’t understand. It’s not a question of artistic integrity. Not really.” He leaned closer, suddenly earnest. I wondered if he had any ointment for that nose. “See—there’s a spectrum you can work along. Call it ‘intended meaningfulness.’ At one end you have your absurdist pieces. Things happen in an unconnected manner. Nothing is predictable. Nothing is rational. Godot never shows.” He smiled.
I didn’t get the reference. Probably to his own work. Some of these guys think the grant Committee memorizes their every detail. The door opened on a gust of wind and a cop entered. The waitress brought God cherry pie on a thick beige plate.
“I don’t think much of absurdist stuff,” he continued. “I mean, where’s the art? If literally anything can happen, why bother? But at the other end is all that tight moral order. Punish the bad, reward the good, solve the mysteries, give every act simple-minded motives and rational outcomes. B-o-r-i-n-g. And not all that just or compassionate, either, no matter what those artists say. What’s so compassionate about imposing a single pattern on the lion and the ox? Or on the worm in the heart of the rose, for that matter?”
“I wish you wouldn’t be so self-referential. It’s an annoying mannerism.”
“But you get my point.”
“Yes, I do. You go for texture. And density. And diversity. All com-mendable. But not very commercial.”
“I didn’t think this was supposed to be a commercial competition!”
“It’s not,” I said. “But do you realize how many mediocre artists out there justify their mediocrity by their lack of accessibility? Just because they’re not commercial doesn’t mean they’re grandly above all standards and judgments. Not every finger twitch is sacred just because it’s theirs.”
“That’s true.” God slumped on his stool a third time. He certainly was a volatile kid. But honest. Not many can see the line between self-justification and true originality. I started to like him. The cop took a seat at the end of the counter. The boys flipped the finger at his back. The hooker wept softly. Her mascara smudged under her eyes.
“Look, son,” I said, “don’t take criticism so hard. Instead, use it. You’re still in the running, and you’ve got a thousand years. Rework the more outré stuff to bring it in line with your major themes. Tone down your use of color. Make the ending a little clearer. That’s all I’m suggesting. Give yourself a fighting chance.”
He didn’t say anything.
“After all, it’s a pretty big grant.”
Yes,” he said tonelessly. He watched the hooker cry. Her fat pimp showed her something in his hand; from this angle I couldn’t see what. The old couple rose to go, helping each other up. The waitress put an order of fries in front of the cop and bent to rub her varicose veins.
“If you win, it could mean a major boost to your career. You have a responsibility to your own talent.”
“Yes.”
“So think about revisions.”
“The thing is,” God said slowly, “I filled out the application forms a long time ago. Before I began work. It looks pretty different to me now. I do feel a responsibility to the work, but maybe not in the way you mean.”
Something in his voice turned me cold. I’d heard that tone before. Recently. I pushed aside his pie, which he hadn’t touched, and covered his hand with mine. “Son—”
“Didn’t you wonder why I thought at first that you were a cop?”
The real cop turned his head to glance at us. He ate the last of his fries, nodded at the waitress, and made for the door, brushing past the tottering old couple. The codger fumbled in his pocket for a tip.
I could hear the thickness in my voice. “Son—it doesn’t work like that.”
“Maybe it does for me.” He looked directly into my eyes. His own were very dark, with layered depths, like fine ash. I wondered how I could have thought him only twenty-eight. The cop left, banging the door behind him. The fat pimp pulled the hooker to her feet. She was still crying. The old man laid a dollar bill, a quarter, and three pennies on the table.
I said, “So okay, you feel responsible. It’s your work, the outlines are yours, even if it got away from you and took off in directions you never intended. That happens. It’s still yours. But that doesn’t mean it’s you. It’s your art, son, not your life. There’s a difference, and it’s crucial. The people who confuse the two aren’t thinking straight.”
He turned those dark eyes away from me, and shrugged. “I feel responsible, is all. For all of it. Even the part that got away from me.”
Suddenly he smiled whimsically. “Accepting responsibility again would actually strengthen the imagery pattern, wouldn’t it? A leitmotif. The Committee might actually like that.”
They probably would. I said carefully, “A competition is no real reason to go native.”
“It isn’t my reason.” Abruptly he flung out one hand. “Ah, don’t you see? I love it. All of it. Even if it’s flawed, even if I screwed up, even if I lose. I love it.”
He did. I saw that now. He loved it. Loved this. The old couple tottered toward the door. The two teenage boys shot out of their booth. One of them grabbed the tip off the table; the other lunged for the old lady’s purse, ripping it off her arm. She fell backwards, thin arms flail-ing, squeaking “oh oh oh oh…” Instantly the old man raised his cane and brought it down hard on the boy’s head. He shrieked, and blood sprang onto his cheek. The boy, outraged, yelled “Fuck! What you go do that for, you old bastard!” Then both boys tore out the door.
The fat pimp helped the old woman up. He was very gentle. “You all right, ma’am?” The hooker, still crying, reached out one deft hand and stole the old man’s wallet from his pocket. The old woman stood, shaky but unhurt. The pimp escorted them to the door, stopped, walked back to the hooker. Silently she handed him the wallet. His fat hands curled into fists. He returned the wallet to the old man, and all four of them left. The waitress leaned over in the silent diner and rubbed her varicose veins.
I have never wanted to be an artist myself.
There wasn’t much else to say. Maybe God would actually go through with it again, maybe not. Sometimes these guys are more in love with the idea of artistic risk than with the actuality. But he had done it once. All of it, right up to the final artistic sacrifice. That set him apart. I couldn’t tell him this—against Committee rules—but that part of his work was what had earned him the first position on the waiting list. It had been an impressive set-piece, especially amidst the uneven emotional tone of the rest of his work. And if he did it again, it would certainly strengthen the imagery pattern in his entry. He was right about that. His chances of winning would increase dramatically. If, of course, he survived.
He had his place on the short list only because another candidate hadn’t. “Withdrew” has a lot of meanings.
God grinned at me. Not a smile this time, an actual grin. “I’m sorry to be so stubborn. It’s not like I don’t appreciate your interest.”
“Tell me something. Do you do all your own construction work?”
He rubbed his sunburned nose and laughed. “You know how it is. If you want something done right…”
“Yes. Well.” I held out my hand and this time he took it, still grinning. He sat on the counter stool almost jauntily. I’d been right to like him.
Outside, it was just getting dark. Clouds raced across the sky from the west, casting strange shadows. Litter blew in gusts at my feet: news-papers, Styrofoam cups, a torn shirt. The shirt bore brown stains that might have been blood. The shadows lengthened, lying at right angles to each other.
Each work of art has its own internal pace; a thousand years is different here.
I thought I could hear them on the horizon, dragging the heavy wo
oden cross, howling about the thorned crown. Coming for him.
Afterword to “Grant Us This Day”
I’m very fond of this story (which is why it’s included in this volume), although some readers have found the ending obscure. No writer should ever explain what his or her fiction “means”—the meaning should be carried by the story—but sometimes it’s difficult to find the right balance between over-explaining (“Don’t insult the reader’s intelligence”) and under-explaining (“Huh?”). Sometimes a writer, in retrospect, wishes she had hit that balance better in the first place. So I’m going to violate best-practices procedure and explain.
God created this universe, with Earth as its most intricate creation and his own crucifixion as a flashy set-piece, in order to win a cosmic universe-creating contest. He didn’t win. Now he has a second chance to fix some of the errors and resubmit, and the last lines imply that, despite his own suffering and some less-than-desirable outcomes, he’s going to allow himself to be crucified again, for the sake of his art. There. I explained it. This is my resubmission for the story as art.
THE KINDNESS OF STRANGERS
When morning finally dawns, Rochester isn’t there anymore.
Jenny stands beside Eric, gazing south from the rising ground that yesterday was a fallow field. Maybe the whole city hasn’t vanished. Certainly the tall buildings are gone, Xerox Square and Lincoln Tower and the few others that just last night poked above the horizon, touched by the red fire of the setting September sun. But unlike Denver or Tokyo or Seattle, Rochester, New York, sits—sat—on flat ground and there’s no point from which the whole city could be seen at once. And it was such a small city.
“Maybe they only took downtown,” Jenny says to Eric, “and Penfield is still there or Gates, or Brighton…”
Eric just looks at her and pulls out his cell yet again. Most of the others—other what? refugees?—are still asleep in their cars or tents or sleeping bags on the dew-soaked weeds. There aren’t nearly as many refugees as Jenny expected. Faced with the choice of staying in the city—and such a small city!—or leaving it, most had stayed. Devil you know and all that.
She thinks she might be a little hysterical.
Eric walks around the car, cell pressed to his ear. Deirdre will not answer, will never answer again, but that won’t stop him from trying. He tried even as he and Jenny hastily packed up her Dodge Caravan yesterday afternoon, even as she drove frantically south, even as they were stopped. When the battery in Eric’s cell runs down, he will take hers. Jenny, sure of this if of nothing else, presses her hands to her temple, trying to stop the blood pounding there. It doesn’t work.
“Good morning,” says an alien, coming up behind her. “Breakfast is ready now.”
Jenny whirls around and stumbles backward, falling against the hood of her van. This one is female, a tall Scandinavian-looking blonde. Her pink skin glows with health; her blue eyes shine warmly; her teeth are small and regular. She is dressed like last night’s alien, in a ground-length, long-sleeved brown garment. Loose, modest, cultureless, suitable for dissolving cities on any part of the globe.
Definitely a little hysterical.
“No, thank you,” Jenny manages.
“Are you sure?” the alien asks. She gestures toward the low, pale buildings at the far end of the sloping meadow. “The coffee is excellent today.”
“No, thank you.”
The alien smiles and moves on to the next car. Eric turns on Jenny. “Why are you so polite to them?”
She doesn’t answer. To say anything—anything at all—will be to unleash the rage he’s been battling for fourteen hours. So far, Eric has held that rage in check. She can’t risk it.
“Here,” he says, thrusting a Quaker Oats breakfast bar at her. She isn’t hungry but takes it anyway.
“Some of us are going to dig a latrine,” he says, not looking at her, and strides off.
Two cars over, a woman with crazy eyes fires a 9 mm at the alien. The bullet ricochets off her, striking another car’s hubcap. People wake and cry out. The alien smiles at the crazed human.
“Good morning. Breakfast is ready now.”
Probably the aliens aren’t even present. If you touch one—or hit it or shotgun it or hurl a Molotov cocktail at it, all of which were tried last night—you encounter a tough, impenetrable shell that doesn’t even wobble under impact. Personal force field, someone said. Holographic projection, said another, protected by a force field. Jenny has no idea who’s right, and it hardly matters. The same maybe-force-field was what stopped her and Eric’s mad drive south last night. Another transparent wall prevented her from retracing her route. A hundred or so cars were thus invisibly herded into this empty field, their drivers leaping out to compare sketchy information, children crying in the backseats and wives hunched over car radios, their faces in white shock.
Bombay and Karachi had been first, vanishing at 2:16 p.m. No explosion, no dust, no blinding light. One moment, reported dazed observers by satellite, the great cities and their vast suburbs had existed and the next they were gone, leaving bare ground that ended in roads sheared off as neatly as if by a very sharp knife, in halves of temples on the shear line, in bisected holy cows. The ground was not even scorched. People standing beyond the vanishing point saw nothing happen.
Fifteen minutes later it was Delhi, Shanghai, and Moscow.
Fifteen minutes after that, Seoul, Sao Paolo, Istanbul, Lima, and Mexico City.
Then Jakarta, New York, Tokyo, Beijing, Cairo, Tehran, and Riyad.
By this time the hysterical media had figured out that cities were vanishing in order of size, and by a progression of prime numbers. At 3:16 p.m. (London, Bogota, Lagos, Baghdad, Bangkok, Lahore, Dacca, Rio de Janeiro, Bangalore, Wuhan, and Tientsin), the panicked evacuations began. Most people were vaporized (except that no vapor remained) long before they reached the end of the murderous city traffic jams.
Canton, Toronto, Jiddah, Abidjan, Chongqing, Santiago, Calcutta, Singapore, Chennai, St. Petersburg, Shenyang, Los Angeles, Ahmadabad.
As soon as he heard, Eric called Deirdre in Chicago, over and over, even as he and Jenny had been packing her car. He hadn’t been able to get through by either cell or land line: All circuits busy. Please try your call again later.
Pusan, Alexandria, Hyderabad, Ankara, Pyongyang, Yokohama, Montreal, Casablanca, Ho Chi Minh City, Berlin, Nanjing, Addis Ababa, Poona, Medellin, Kano.
Only two United States cities so far. Jenny lived in Henrietta, Rochester’s southernmost suburb. The roads were crowded but not impassable. She inched through traffic, the radio turned on, while Eric tried Deirdre over and over again: All circuits busy.
At 4:01, Chicago vanished along with Omdurman, Surat, Madrid, Sian, Kanpur, Havana, Jaipur, Nairobi, Harbin, Buenos Aires, Incheon, Surabaya, Kiev, Hangzhou, Salvador, Taipei, Hai Phong, and Dar es Salaam. Eric kept calling. He said, “Maybe she was visiting someone out of the city, shopping at a mall someplace rural…. She doesn’t always have her cell turned on!”
Jenny knew better than to answer. She concentrated on the road, on the traffic, on the panicky radio announcer relaying by satellite a report from where Houston used to be.
“Can I have that?”
A small voice at her elbow. Jenny realizes she is still holding the unopened Quaker Oats bar. The little boy is maybe five or six, dirty and snot-nosed, but with wide dark eyes that hold soft depths, like ash. He stares hungrily at the breakfast bar.
“Sure, take it.” Her voice is thick. “What’s your name?”
“Ricky.” He tears off the wrapping and drops it on the grass. Jenny picks it up.
“Where’s your mom, Ricky?”
“Over there.” He gobbles the bar in three bites. His mother, a voluptuous redhead in pink stretch pants, sits on the ground with her back against an old green SUV. She nurses an infant from one large breast and watches Jenny. All at once she bawls, “Ricky! Get your ass over here!”
Ricky ignores this.
“Do you got any more food?”
“No,” Jenny lies. Apparently not everyone thought to pack their cars with food. Those that have will run out before long. The low, pale buildings still sit unvisited.
“Ricky!” his mother screams, and this time he leaves.
Jenny pulls off her sweater; the morning sun is turning the day hot. She opens her cell to key in her brother Bob’s number. Bob lives with his family in Dundee, a small town fifty miles away; his and Jenny’s mother lives with them. Jenny’s sister and her family are nearby. “Bob? You all okay?… No, nothing changed since last night…. Jane? You talk to her?…. Okay, look, I don’t want to run down the phone too much…. Love you, too….” When she closes the case, Eric is back.
They stare at each other. Now it will come, Jenny thinks. She feels as if she’s carrying a teacup of nitroglycerin across a tightrope; the fall is only a matter of time. But all Eric says is, “There’s a man here who’s good at organization. We divided into sections and checked out the whole wall. No breaks, and it extends as far up as anyone can throw a stone and as far underground as we had time to dig. The force field surrounds the buildings, too. Anything new on the radio?”
“No,” Jenny says, not telling him that she hasn’t been listening. But he knows; his question was not inquisitive but hostile. He can’t help that—Jenny knows as much—but she recoils as if he’d struck her. She’s always been too sensitive to rejection.
Eric says, “I’m going back to help the tunnel crew.”
“Okay.” And then she can’t stand it anymore. “Eric, I’m so sorry, but it’s not my fault that my family is alive and Deirdre and Mary—”
“Don’t,” he says, so low and dangerous that Jenny is shocked into silence. Eric is not ordinarily a dangerous man. One thing she loved about him was his lighthearted exuberance.
