Unconquered Countries-Four Novellas

by Geoff Ryman

  That afternoon, we had our talk. Since we’d gotten the food, it was our turn to cook lunch. So I got him away from the Boys.

  We took our soup and crackers up to the top of the mound. The mound is dug out of a small hill behind the Station. James makes it in his bulldozer, listening to Mozart. He pulls the trolleys up a long dirt ramp, and empties them, and smooths the sandstone soil over each day’s addition of Stiffs. I get the feeling he thinks he works like Mozart. The mound rises up in terraces, each terrace perfectly level, its slope at the same angle as the one below it. The dirt is brick red and there are seven levels. It looks like Babylon.

  There are cameras on top, but you can see over the fence. You can see the New England forest. It looks tired and small, maybe even dusty, as if it needed someone to clean the leaves. There’s another small hill. You can hear birds. Royce and I climbed up to the top, and I gathered up my nerve and said, “I really like you.”

  “Uh-huh,” he said, balancing his soup, and I knew it wasn’t going to work.

  Leave it, I thought, don’t push, it’s hard for him, he doesn’t know you.

  “You come here a lot,” he said. It was a statement.

  “I come here to get away.”

  Royce blew out through his nostrils: a kind of a laugh. “Get away? You know what’s under your feet?”

  “Yes,” I said, looking at the forest. Neither one of us wanted to sit on that red soil, even to eat the soup. I passed him his crackers, from my coat pocket.

  “So why did you pick me? Out of all the other Stiffs?”

  “I guess I just liked what I saw.”

  “Why?”

  I smiled with embarrassment at being forced to say it; it was as if there were no words for it that were not slightly wrong. “Because I guess you’re kind of good-looking and I…just thought I would like you a lot.”

  “Because I’m black?”

  “You are black, yes.”

  “Are most of your boyfriends black?”

  Bull’s-eye. That was scary. “I, uh, did go through a phase where I guess I was kind of fixated on black people. But I stopped that, I mean, I realized that what I was actually doing was depersonalizing the people I was with, which wasn’t very flattering to them. But that is all over. It really isn’t important to me now.”

  “So you went out and made yourself sleep with white people.” He does not, I thought, even remotely like me.

  “I found white people I liked. It didn’t take much.”

  “You toe the line all the way down the line, don’t you?” he said. I thought I didn’t understand.

  “Is that why you’re here?” A blank from me. “You toe the line, the right line, so you’re here.”

  “Yes,” I said. “In a way. Big Lou saw me on the platform, and knew me from politics. I guess you don’t take much interest in politics.” I was beginning to feel like hitting back.

  “Depends on the politics,” he said, briskly.

  “Well you’re OK, I guess. You made it out.”

  “Out of where?”

  I just looked back at him. “Los Angeles.”

  He gave a long and very bitter sigh, mixed with a kind of chortle. “Whenever I am in this…situation, there is the conversation. I always end up having the same conversation. I reckon you’re going to tell me I’m not black enough.”

  “You do kind of shriek I am middle class.”

  “Uh-huh. You use that word class, so that means it’s not racist, right?”

  “I mean, you’re being loyal to your class, to which most black people do not belong.”

  “Hey, bro’, you can’t fool me, we’re from the same neighborhood. That sort of thing?” It was imitation ghetto. “You want somebody with beads in his hair and a beret and a semi who hates white people, but likes you because you’re so upfront movement? Is that your little dream? A big bad black man?”

  I turned away from him completely.

  He said, in a very cold still voice. “Do you get off on corpses, too?”

  “This was a mistake,” I said. “Let’s go back.”

  “I thought you wanted to talk.”

  “Why are you doing this?”

  “Because,” he said, “you are someone who takes off dead men’s watches, and you look like you could have been a nice person.”

  “I am,” I said, and nearly wept, “a nice person.”

  “That’s what scares the shit out of me.”

  “You think I want this? You think I don’t hate this?” I think that’s when I threw down the soup. I grabbed him by the shirt sleeves and held him. I remember being worried about the cameras, so I kept my voice low and rapid, like it was scuttling.

  “Look, I was on the train, I was going to die, and Lou said, you can live. You can help here and live. So I did it. And I’m here. And so are you.”

  “I know,” he said, softly.

  “So OK, you don’t like me, I can live with that, fine, no problem, you’re under no obligation, so let’s just go back.”

  “You come up here because of the forest,” he said.

  “Yes! Brilliant!”

  “Even mass murderers need love too, right?”

  “Yes! Brilliant!”

  “And you want me to love you? When you bear the same relation to me, as Lou does to you?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t care.” I was sitting down now, hugging myself. The bowl of soup was on the ground by my foot, tomato sludge creeping out of it. I kicked it. “Sorry I hassled you.”

  “You didn’t hassle me.”

  “All I want is one little part of my life to have a tiny corner of goodness in it. Just one little place. I probably won’t, but I feel like if I don’t find it soon, I will bust up into a million pieces. Not love. Not necessarily. Just someone nice to talk to, who I really like. Otherwise I think one day I will climb back into one of those trains.” When I said it, I realized it was true. I hadn’t known I was that far gone. I thought I had been making a play for sympathy.

  Royce was leaning in front of me, looking me in the face. “Listen, I love you.”

  “Bullshit.” What kind of mind-fuck now?

  He grabbed my chin, and turned my head back round. “No. True. Not maybe in the way you want, but true. You really do look, right now, like one of those people on the train. Like someone I just unloaded.”

  I didn’t know quite what he was saying, and I wasn’t sure I trusted him, but I did know one thing. “I don’t want to go back to that bunkhouse, not this afternoon.”

  “OK. We’ll stay up here and talk.”

  I felt like I was stepping out onto ice. “But can we talk nicely? A little bit less heavy duty?”

  “Nicely. Sounds sweet, doesn’t mean anything. Like the birds?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Like the birds.”

  I reckon that, altogether, we had two weeks. A Lullaby in Birdland. Hum along if you want to. You don’t need to know the words.

  Every afternoon after the work, Royce and I went up the mound and talked. I think he liked talking to me, I’ll go as far as that. I remember one afternoon he showed me photographs from his wallet. He still had a wallet, full of people.

  He showed me his mother. She was extremely thin, with dark limp flesh under her eyes. She was trying to smile. Her arms were folded across her stomach. She looked extremely kind, but tired.

  There was a photograph of a large red brick house. It had white window sills and a huge white front door, and it sagged in the way that only very old houses do.

  “Whose is that?” I asked.

  “Ours. Well, my family’s. Not my mother’s. My uncle lives there now.”

  “It’s got a Confederate flag over it!”

  Royce grinned and folded up quietly; his laughter was almost always silent. “Well, my great-grandfather didn’t want to lose all his slaves, did he?”

  One half of Royce’s family were black, one half were white. There were terrible wedding receptions divided in half where no one spoke. “The whi
te people are all so embarrassed, particularly the ones who want to be friendly. There’s only one way a black family gets a house like that: Grandfather messed around a whole bunch. He hated his white family, so he left the house to us. My uncle and aunt want to open it up as a Civil War museum and put their picture on the leaflet.” Royce folded up again. “I mean, this is in Georgia. Can you imagine all those rednecks showing up and finding a nice black couple owning it, and all this history about black regiments?”

  “Who’s that?”

  “My cousin. She came to live with us for a while.”

  “She’s from the white half.”

  “Nope. She’s black.” Royce was enjoying himself. The photograph showed a rather plump, very determined teenage girl with orange hair, slightly wavy, and freckles.

  “Oh.” I was getting uncomfortable, all this talk of black and white.

  “It’s really terrible. Everything Cyndi likes, I mean everything, is black, but her father married a white woman, and she ended up like that. She wanted to be black so bad. Every time she met anyone, she’d start explaining how she was black, really. She’d go up to black kids and start explaining, and you could see them thinking ‘Who is this white girl and is she out of her mind?’ We were both on this program, so we ended up in a white high school and that was worse because no one knew they’d been integrated when she was around. The first day this white girl asked her if she’d seen any of the new black kids. Then her sister went and became a top black fashion model, you know, features in Ebony, and that was it. It got so bad, that whenever Cyndi meant white, she’d say ‘the half of me I hate.’”

  “What happened to her?”

  “I think she gave up and became white. She wanted to be a lawyer. I don’t know what happened to her. She got caught in LA.”

  I flipped over the plastic. There was a photograph of a mother and a small child. “Who’s that?”

  “My son,” said Royce. “That’s his mother. Now she thinks she’s a witch.” An ordinary looking girl stared sullenly out at the camera. She had long frizzy hair and some sort of ethnic dress. “She’ll go up to waiters she doesn’t like in restaurants and whisper spells at them in their ears.”

  “How long ago was this?” I felt an ache, as if I’d lost him, as if I had ever had him.

  “Oh ten years ago, before I knew anything. I mean, I wouldn’t do it now. I’d like any kid of mine to have me around, but his mother and I don’t get on. She told my aunt that she’d turned me gay by magic to get revenge.”

  “Were they in LA too?”

  Royce went very still, and nodded yes.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  He passed me back the wallet. “Here. That’s all of them. Last time we got together.”

  There was a tiny photograph, full of people. The black half. On the far right was a very tall, gangling fifteen-year-old, looking bristly and unformed, shy and sweet. Three of the four people around him were looking at him, bursting with suppressed smiles. I wish I’d known him then, as well. I wanted to know him all his life.

  “I got a crazy, crazy family,” he said, shaking his head with affection. “I hope they’re all still OK.” It was best not to think about what was happening outside. Or inside, here.

  It was autumn, and the sun would come slanting through the leaves of the woods. It would make a kind of corona around them, especially if the Boys were burning garbage and there was smoke in the air. The light would come in shafts, like God was hiding behind the leaves. The leaves were dropping one by one.

  There was nothing in the Station that was anything to do with Royce. Everything that made him Royce, that made him interesting, is separate. It is the small real things that get obliterated in a holocaust, forgotten. The horrors are distinct and do not connect with the people, but it is the horrors that get remembered in history.

  When it got dark, we would go back down, and I hated it because each day it was getting dark earlier and earlier. We’d get back and find that there had been—oh—a macaroni fight over lunch, great handprints of it over the windows and on the beds, that had been left to dry. Once we got back to the waiting room, and there had been a fight, a real one. Lou had given one of the Boys a bloody nose, to stop it. There was blood on the floor. Lou lectured us all about male violence, saying anyone who used violence in the Station would get violence back.

  He took away all of Tom’s clothes. Tom was beautiful, and very quiet, but sometimes he got mad. Lou kicked him out of the building in punishment. It was going to be a cold night. Long after the Grils had turned out the lights, we could hear Tom whimpering, just outside the door. “Please, Lou. It’s cold. Lou, I’m sorry. Lou? I just got carried away. Please?”

  I felt Royce jump up and throw the blanket aside. Oh God, I thought, don’t get Lou mad at us. Royce padded across the dark room, and I heard the door open, and I heard him say, “OK, come in.

  “Sorry, Lou,” Royce said. “But we all need to get to sleep.”

  Lou only grunted. “OK,” he said, in a voice that was biding its time.

  And Royce came back to my bed.

  I would hold him, and he would hold me, but only, I think, to stop falling out of the bed. It was so narrow and cold. Royce’s body was always taut, like each individual strand of muscle had been pulled back, tightly, from the shoulder. It was as tense through the night as if it were carrying something, and nothing I could do would soothe it. What I am trying to say, and I have to say it, is that Royce was impotent, at least with me, at least in the Station. “As long as I can’t do it,” he told me once on the mound, “I know I haven’t forgotten where I am.” Maybe that was just an excuse. The Boys knew about it, of course. They listened in the dark and knew what was and was not happening.

  And the day would begin at dawn. The little automatic car, the porridge and the bread, the icy showers, and the wait for the first train. James the Tape Head, Harry with his constant grin, Gary who was tall and ropey, and who kept tugging at his pigtail. He’d been a trader in books, and he talked books and politics and thought he was Lou’s lieutenant. Lou wasn’t saying. And Bill the Brylcreem, and Charlie with his still, and Tom. The Boys. Hating each other, with no one else to talk to, waiting for the day when the Grils would burn us, or the food in the cart would have an added secret ingredient. When they were done with us.

  Royce talked, learning who the cameras were.

  There were only four Grils, dividing the day into two shifts. Royce gave them names. There was Alice and Hortensia, and Miss Scarlett who turned out to be from Atlanta. Only one of the Grils took a while to find a name, and she got it the first day one of the cameras laughed.

  She’d been called Greta, I think because she had such a low, deep voice. Sometimes Royce called her Sir. Then one morning, Lou was late, and as he came, Royce said. “Uh-oh. Here comes the Rear Admiral.”

  Lou was very sanctimonious about always taking what he assumed was the female role in sex. The cameras knew that; they watched all the time. The camera laughed. It was a terrible laugh; a thin, high, wailing, helpless shriek.

  “Hey, Sir, that’s really Butch,” said Royce, and the name Butch stuck.

  So did Rear Admiral. God bless all who sail in him.

  “Hiya, Admiral,” gasped the camera, and even some of the Boys laughed too.

  Lou looked confused, a stiff and awkward smile on his face. “It’s better than being some macho prick,” he said.

  That night, he took me to one side, by the showers.

  “Look,” he said. “I think maybe you should get your friend to ease up a bit.”

  “Oh Lou, come on, it’s just jokes.”

  “You think all of this is a joke!” yelped Lou.

  “No.”

  “Don’t think I don’t understand what’s going on.” The light caught in his eyes, pinprick bright.

  “What do you think is going on, Lou?”

  I saw him appraising me. I saw him give me the benefit of the doubt. “What you’ve done, Rich, an
d maybe it isn’t your fault, is to import an ideological wild card into this station.”

  “Oh Lou,” I groaned. I groaned for him, for his mind.

  “He’s not with us. I don’t know what these games are that he’s playing with the women, but he’s putting us all in danger. Yeah, sure, they’re laughing now, but sooner or later he’ll say the wrong thing, and some of us will get burned. Cooked. And another thing. These little heart to heart talks you have with each other. Very nice. But that’s just the sort of thing the Station cannot tolerate. We are a team, we are a family, we’ve broken with all of that nuclear family shit, and you guys have re-imported it. You’re breaking us up, into little compartments. You, Royce, James, even Harry, you’re all going off into little corners away from the rest of us. We have got to work together. Now I want to see you guys with the rest of us. No more withdrawing.”

  “Lou,” I said, helpless to reply. “Lou. Fuck off.”

  His eyes had the light again. “Careful, Rich.”

  “Lou. We are with you guys 22 hours a day. Can you really not do without us for the other two? What is wrong with a little privacy, Lou?”

  “There is no privacy here,” he said. “The cameras pick up just about every word. Now look. I took on a responsibility. I took on the responsibility of getting all of us through this together, show that there is a place in the revolution for good gay men. I have to know what is going on in the Station. I don’t know what you guys are saying to each other up there, I don’t know what the cameras are hearing. Now you lied to me, Rich. You didn’t know Royce before he came here, did you. We don’t know who he is, what he is. Rich, is Royce even gay?”

  “Yes! Of course!”

  “Then how does he fuck?”

  “That’s none of your business.”

  “Everything here is my business. You don’t fuck him, he doesn’t fuck you, so what goes on?”

  I was too horrified to speak.

  “Look,” said Lou, relenting. “I can understand it. You love the guy. You think I don’t feel that pull, too, that pull to save them? We wouldn’t be gay if we didn’t. So you see him on the platform, and he is very nice, and you think, Dear God, why does he have to die?”