“You know my name?”
We all know your name.
“We?”
The empty ones. I want to show you something. Will you let me show you?
“Yes.”
Press your hands to the brick, the voice said, and she did. Shut your eyes,it said, and she did.
Laughter. A little girl ran into a swathe of sunlight. Herself, age five. “No,” she whispered.
Watch.
Agnes at ten, Agnes at twelve. The house. Her house. Each room, each smell.
Christmas cooking and make-up and wet paint. Her mother’s smile growing slimmer and the rest of her less so as time sped by. Ganesha, scrambling from room to room with one long undiminishing mischievous giggle.
Joy, then. Ganesha’s joy. The bliss of wholeness. The ecstasy of love, of family. Home meant love, meant wholeness. Shrinking, suddenly, when Agnes stormed out at age sixteen. After that a bereft, endless wondering. Where did she go? Why was she so upset? How have I failed her?
Her mother standing alone at the top of the stairs. Cigarettes. Burned TV dinners.
“Please,” Agnes said, too loudly, knowing what was next.
The house, empty. Ganesha stumbling. Shrinking. And then weeping, as pain began to break him apart. Hands growing twisted, pudgy child-fingers becoming cat-sharp claws. Pieces of trunk sloughing off. The transect maintenance worker brought oranges, but they did not stop what was happening to her friend. They merely channeled off his anger, his rage, his ability to lash out. When the wrecking ball came it was almost a relief. Ganesha went gladly, already mostly gone. Something bigger was there, though. A bigger, deeper something that was Ganesha but wasn’t. It shrieked. She wept, hearing it wail.
The windows went still.
“I thought you were all... on your own. Separate. Micah didn’t know what was happening to any of the other houses.”
A rippling shifted through the walls, and when the voice came again it came from a crude and jagged mouth that opened in the bricks above the fireplace. Autochthonous sentient structural emanations are complex. The spirit that takes on physical form, the thing that humans interact with, is only one piece. There is another piece. One that grows out of the earth the house is built on. One that springs from a common source with all the other autochthonous emanations in the area. These pieces are rarely aware of each other. Until they need to be. Do you understand?
“Sure,” and Agnes was startled to see that she did. She thought of how her mother understood God. She thought of the thing she had sensed, for an instant, in the bank. Something bigger and colder and crueler and more terrifying than a human mind could ever comprehend.
We saw you, Agnes. We saw what was inside of you. We knew that you were the one who could help us.
TRASK WAS STRESSED out about something. His forehead had extra lines in it; his eyebrows were arrows aiming at each other. He was immersed in his phone. When she logged the block of house keys back in, he left the key in the cabinet lock. Like he always did.
“Are you going to demolish all of them?”
He looked up from his phone, his face contorted briefly. By what? Hate, she thought at first, but that wasn’t right, whatever it was had no such intensity. Apathy, maybe, but that was only half the story. Trask took two reports from the top of the stack and flung them at her. “Read it yourself if you’re so nosy.”
He doesn’t care about you, she realized. He never has. He thinks you’re stupid.
Agnes filled paperwork with scribbles until Trask left the office to take a call, and then she opened the cabinet and pocketed the key to Micah’s house. She dumped the rest of the keys from Transect 4 into her backpack, and put the block back in the cabinet, and locked it.
After thirty awful seconds, Agnes unlocked the cabinet again and took the keys to the rest of the Transects.
Trask’s screen was still on. She stared at it. Her plan was a terrible one. She could destroy the keys, but how much time would that buy them? Trask would learn what had happened soon enough, and he didn’t need a key to knock a building down. She’d be out of a job and those spirits would still get destroyed.
Agnes sat down at his desk. He didn’t leave her alone with so much power at her fingertips because he trusted her. He did it because he didn’t think she was smart enough to do anything about it. He gave her the job not because he liked her or saw potential, but because she showed him how desperate she was. How hungry. Hungry enough to betray her own mother for a shit job with no health insurance.
She clicked over to the window where the day’s offers had piled up. One by one she clicked yes, selling off a couple dozen buildings with Trask’s credentials. And then she made a series of offers on the Bank of America properties scattered throughout the county, offering ten million dollars for each of them when most were barely worth ten thousand.
Then she opened his calendar and typed in an appointment for him, tomorrow at twilight, at 12 Burnt Hills Road, with the plumbing maintenance foreman.
Trask might wonder what that was, how it had gotten there; he might even call the plumber to confirm. But most likely he would not. He was a man who trusted his calendar.
Would it kill him? she wondered. The thought of being a party to Trask’s murder did not disturb her as much as it should have. What she’d mistaken for officious mentorship had been contempt, combined with a love of feeling smarter than someone. More importantly, she’d do anything to keep Micah from going through what her home had gone through.
Chase would dispute the sales she had approved as Trask, and the offers he’d made, but Bank of America would take them to court to get them to honor these entirely legal contracts.
Later she buried the backpack full of keys in the red raw clay where her house had been.
“THAT’S THE LAST of it?” Micah asked, when she set the milk crate down on the porch.
“Such as it is.”
“You were living there?” he asked, wrinkling his nose in the direction of her car.
“Who really lives, anyway,” she asked, squatting to kiss his mouth. He handed her a glass of iced tea.
She took a sip, then drained the glass. “This is seriously the best iced tea I have ever had in my life.”
“I know,” he said. “And it has the added benefit of not having any calories.”
He put his arm around her. Night was coming and so was November. His heat was so strong and clear she didn’t believe it wasn’t real.
That morning, she had visited 12 Burnt Hills Road. Trask had been missing for two days. She expected blood and carnage, but the inside of the house was as it had always been. Wind wailed, weakly, somewhere.
The police came, said the stones above the mantle.
“They would have seen the address in his calendar,” she said. “I’m sorry, but there was no way for me to erase it after he saw it...”
He is well hidden. As is his vehicle. They found nothing, and departed. Touch the stones, if you want to see.
She didn’t, but she did. And saw him get out of his fancy truck, call out for the plumber, pat his pockets for the keys he knew he had not brought because the plumbers had their own set. Saw the front door creak open. Saw Trask step inside. Saw stones and wood and brick crawl together. Saw windows shatter into long cruel talons at the end of stumpy fingers. Saw the seat of Trask’s trousers darken.
“This is temporary,” she said, thinking of the cold cruel immense entity she had glimpsed at work. With Trask missing and the police involved, the court battle would drag on for a while. But not forever. “Eventually, the bank will move forward with a way to do what it wants.”
Yes, the house said. And so will we.
She didn’t ask What about Micah? His shape, his personality – is he part of you? Did you use him to manipulate me? As long as she didn’t know the answer, she could pretend it didn’t matter.
Micah startled her back to the here-and-now, carrying a radio on an extension cord. They danced to the Rolling Stones on the po
rch of the house that was hers, but not. Later, they lay in a bed so big she could not believe her stupidity – to think that this had been here all along, empty and waiting, while she slept in a car in the Walmart parking lot. Because of Trask, inside her head, and the bank and the school and everyone else in this world who said you only deserved what you could pay for. When she wept, he woke up. They spooned together.
Agnes fought sleep, not wanting to be anywhere else. She counted questions instead of sheep.
When we fight, will he accidentally incinerate me? When he is angry or sad, will blood drip from ceilings and swarms of hornets spell out hateful words on the wall?
She wondered if she would still have her job, without Trask. Probably she would. For now. Both banks would want to maintain the properties while they fought over them in court. She could fix the place up, get real human food, buy Micah the punk rock records he liked. She could lay low, but eventually there would be a confrontation. Ownership would be settled. Someone would come, looking to knock it down or clear it out. But wasn’t that part of what it meant, to have a home? The knowing that it could always be taken away from you? That’s what she never grasped, those long nights in her old house aching to be anywhere else. She had taken ‘home’ for granted, something unbreakable and allotted to each of us, because that’s the way the world should be. And once it was gone she believed everyone deserved the same pain she and her mother went through. Ganesha was dead because of the lies she believed, and her mother’s heart was broken.
But now that she knew something could be taken away, she also knew she could fight for it.
“I love you,” she whispered, to him, to her home, and fell asleep marveling at how easy both things were to claim once you let yourself.
THE KAREN JOY FOWLER BOOK CLUB
Nike Sulway
NIKE SULWAY LIVES and works in regional Queensland. She is the author of The Bone Flute, The True Green of Hope, What The Sky Knows and Rupetta. In 2014, Rupetta became the first work by an Australian author to win the James Tiptree, Jr Award. The award, founded in 1991 by Pat Murphy and Karen Joy Fowler, is an annual literary prize for a work of science fiction or fantasy that expands or explores our understanding of gender. She is quite fond of rhinoceri.
Two bright bangles on an arm clang, a single bangle is silent, wander alone like a rhinoceros.
– Khargavis.ana-sutra [the Rhinoceros Sutra] c.29 BCE
TEN YEARS AGO, Clara had attended a creative writing workshop run by Karen Joy Fowler, and what Karen Joy told her was: We are living in a science fictional world. During the workshop, Karen Joy also kept saying, I am going to talk about endings, but not yet. But Karen Joy never did get around to talking about endings, and Clara left the workshop still feeling as if she was suspended within it, waiting for the second shoe to drop.
Eventually, Clara attempted a cold equations story, and though Karen Joy never read it, Clara thought she might have liked it if she’d had the chance. In Clara’s story, “False Equations”, the Emergency Dispatch Ship (EDS) was packed full of animals, rather than people, and the stowaway was the child of a white-backed vulture pair. An egg when she was smuggled aboard, the stowaway hatched during the journey to Walden (rather than Woden).
Clara had made several copies of the story and sent them out to the other members of her book club. Fern wrote back to say that the story was too complex and far-fetched. Bea wrote that she hadn’t time to read anything just then except the book that they were supposed to be reading for their next meeting. And Belle said simply that there were far too many “Cold Equations” reworkings and inter-textual responses out there, and she didn’t see why Clara had bothered attempting another if she had so little to say about the matter.
Clara, like Fern and all of the other members of the Karen Joy Fowler Book Club, had never managed to finish reading the set book before their scheduled get-together. But then, none of their planned book discussions had yet taken place. There was always some complication, some hindrance that they were incapable of overcoming.
The workshop had not been a total loss, however, since Clara had met Belle there, and they had ended up good friends. They lived near each other – their farms were only a short walk apart – and a few years ago they had opened up a café in town where they served good, simple food and provided their customers with a shaded garden in which to sit and chat.
These days, when Clara can, she takes time off from the café to go and visit her daughter. Alice lives near the great lakes. She has a large house; tall, and stone-walled, with large windows to catch the afternoon breezes. As Clara comes down the shared driveway to Alice’s house, she always experiences a moment of something like regret, or fear. What if, once she enters her daughter’s house, she isn’t able to leave again? What if, once she sees all the children her daughter cares for, she can’t stop herself from saying something cruel? Telling her daughter what she believes: that Alice’s house full of other people’s children is just a way for her daughter to endlessly delay her own grieving, her own letting go of things. Or what if the opposite occurs: what if she enters that house full of children, sees all the work that needs to be done caring for them, and is caught up in her daughter’s Sisyphean task of feeding, bathing, and holding other creatures’ young. Like Sisyphus forever pushing his stone up the same mountain, only to watch it roll down again.
Clara isn’t sure she is a welcome visitor any more, or whether she wants to go there. She doesn’t think about these things directly, but as she comes up the walk she tries to imagine herself greeting and being greeted by her daughter and struggles to construct an image that contains ease or warmth.
As it happens, she finds Alice in the garden with her new lover. They are walking from tree to tree, looking up into the canopy of each one and then moving on.
This is not Alice’s first lover, Jeff, who is dead now, and Clara has difficulty remembering this one’s name. Blue? Balloon?
They go to wallow in the mudhole that spreads out from beneath the African tulip tree. The one Jeff had liked to wallow in with guests. They had been cooling off there together – Alice and Jeff – when they had told Clara there would be no grandchildren. “It’s my fault, I’m afraid,” he’d said, as if he’d forgotten to pick up ice on the way home, but blushingly. “They’re no good, my swimmers. My –”
“She knows what you mean,” Alice had said. “There’s no need to go on and on.”
Clara had remembered, then, the termination Alice had when she was in high school. The waiting room full of pictures of empty landscapes at sunset, the interview with the cheerful nurse, the other young females in the waiting room – all of them avoiding each other’s eyes. And afterwards, her daughter wanting ice cream and to sit by the river and watch the waterbirds dancing in the shallow water. Alice had rested her head on Clara’s shoulder, curled her feet up under her bottom like a child. Her breath had smelled of milk and sweet biscuits, and her hair of antiseptic. It was the last time Clara can remember her daughter wanting to be held.
The garden has changed more than Clara’s daughter has, since Jeff’s passing. The paths that were once just worn earth have been widened and cleared of weeds. The beds of unnamed flowers that Alice and her husband used to grow have been replaced with vegetable patches and rows of imported exotics. Mulched and weeded and trimmed and fertilised to within an inch of their lives.
“You should keep going,” Alice says to her lover.
“Oh,” he says. “Oh yes, of course! Women’s talk.” He winks at Clara as he moves away. “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.”
When he has gone, Alice sighs and settles into a more comfortable position. “The sad thing is, he means it,” she says. “He won’t tolerate me doing anything without consulting him. He calls it communication, when what he really means is him telling me what to do.” She flicks her ears a little to clear away the flies. “It almost makes me glad we’re too different to breed. Imagine us: the parents of the last generation!”
Alice looks across the mudhole to the forest. “I’ve lost track of Dad,” she says. “Wasn’t he out west somewhere, living on a wildlife refuge of some kind?”
“I’d heard that,” Clara said. “Him and that female were working the summers and mostly left alone in the winters. Wandering the hills.”
“Janet,” says her daughter.
“What?”
“Dad’s new partner, her name is Janet.”
She ought not to have come, Clara thinks. Everything her daughter says or asks of her feels like a reproach. Even the gardens are reproachful, the liquidambars arching over the green lawn. The perfect garden beds, the even paths, the vistas like postcards. It was just what she’d dreaded, coming down the driveway, just what she’d been preparing herself for.
Alice wants to show her around the bottom end of the garden, which she says is where Jeff spent most of his time during the last few months of his life. Sometimes, he would fall asleep on the lawn, stretched out like a child and snoring so loudly that the small birds – the fairywrens and tits – would scatter with fear.
“When I woke him up he would always say he hadn’t been sleeping at all,” Alice says. “He’d say he’d been writing. He’d tell me all about whatever it was he had been working on. By the end, the things he told me were just a jumble. A nonsense. But at first I believed him. Or... or I wanted to. He was working on a Cold Equations story, he said. But it was set here on earth, and instead of people, the two characters were rhinos, like us. The two last rhinos on earth. And as soon as one died, the other would become functionally extinct.”
The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, Volume Ten Page 52
