The Stone War

by Madeleine E. Robins

  Jit suggested nothing more, waiting to see what would happen. The mother-woman provided a cascade of images and sensations. Sitting at Tietjen’s side and watching the play of light across his face, or the way he held a clipboard; imagining his hands stroking her breasts or cupping her face. Working outside in the sun, constantly aware of Tietjen, just feet away: of the sheen of sweat on his back and his smell on the hot breeze; of his voice as he spoke to her, making endless plans for the Store, waiting for her patient, reasoned replies. She moved restlessly on her bed, her body shaping itself to Tietjen’s phantom one.

  Jit wriggled, himself. He did not like the sensations, did not like the old woman’s power to stir him this way. It was too much like the feelings he had stolen from Tietjen and the dark woman that had torn through him and left him aching. Jit did not want that again.

  Give it to the Man.

  Jit almost laughed, there in the candlelit darkness, by himself. Let Tee-jin feel the mother-woman’s feelings that were like and unlike the feelings the dark woman had had.

  Slowly Jit reached with his mind and joined them, Tietjen and the mother-woman, like forcing people to join hands, his own hand clasped around to make sure the joining worked. Always before he had taken dreams and memories and transplanted them into Tietjen’s sleeping mind. But this time Jit wanted not just the dream-matter but the mother-woman’s sensations and feelings, wanted the Man to feel the woman’s aching and to share the anger and fear that lay just below the surface of the dream itself. Jit bound the dreamers together, smiling as he did so, and waited to see how the man was hurt.

  Tietjen slept, wondering what the dream would be tonight. The talk with Barbara had taken the edge off his fear and made it easier to dare the dreams. When he did dream, it was vivid and erotic. It was as if he were inside someone else’s body, a woman’s body, and the man who was making love to her was himself. The hands that caressed her breasts were his own; the taste of the skin her lips brushed was his own; the lips that grazed her collarbone and traced their way down over her belly were his. But he felt her responses, felt his breasts—her breasts—swell and yearn toward him, felt the aching between her legs, felt himself, as her, wanting the man who was caressing her.

  In the dream Tietjen was outside himself, in love with himself. Even in his dreams about Irene, where he had finally understood her affection and rage, and her impatience with him, Tietjen had never felt, or understood, the kind of sweetness or pain of the way this woman loved him. He remembered with her memories the sight of him working outside in the hot sun, or teaching one of the people in the Store, or listening, late at night by the light of kerosene lamps, in the planning meetings for the Store. He remembered wanting to trace the shape of his mouth with her fingers, forgiving him when he ran out of patience or was clumsy with people in the Store, loving him when his pleasure and excitement in what they were accomplishing shone, to her eyes, like a lamp. Aching for his pain: for Ketch, for Maia, for his own paralyzing self-doubt. She believed he was lovable. She loved him.

  He knew all this the same way he knew her body, what it was to welcome him inside her, reaching to pull him closer and deeper. Too caught up in the heat and sweep of sensations to care, Tietjen followed her into orgasm.

  But the dream did not end there. Her belly ached afterward, and her face was turned away from the man above her. Tietjen felt tears running down his—her—cheeks. Of relief and pleasure and joy.

  Of fear.

  Fear? Curiously Tietjen began to tease the fear out, but it resisted him and he was distracted by the image of his own dark hair brushing her collarbone, the weight of his head cradled on her breast, the freckled tan of her arm across the dark brown of his tanned shoulder. Again he felt the welling up of love for him, and the tang of fear that accompanied it. My skin is so old, he heard her thinking. She looked at her fingers as they twined through his dark hair—it felt different to her fingers than to Tietjen’s own. Her wedding ring glinted in the moonlight, recalling the memory of the man she had married long ago, another lanky, dark-haired man. A ring with a green stone on her forefinger, which her husband had put there, wrestling it on over the knuckle as both of them laughed.

  Looking at the ring, trying to remember where he had seen it, Tietjen drifted out of the dream and back to consciousness. He felt groggy and heavy, aware that the sheets were soaked with sweat, but too exhausted to do anything about it. Whose body had he occupied in his dream, he wondered. Whose ring was that he had seen on his—her—hand before waking?

  He slept without remembering.

  5

  TIETJEN woke feeling marvelous. He didn’t know why; the weather was still miserably hot and humid and his muscles ached from the work of the day before. He did not remember dreaming. He just felt good. Sitting on the edge of his bed, he looked at the piles of paper and dirty clothes, the rumpled mess of bedclothes, the stack of unwashed cups by the door. He’d been letting things go, he thought. Time to clean up. Maybe it was Barbara’s pep talk from the night before.

  He stripped the bed, gathered the clothes and sheets together by the door, sorted through the papers. Finally he left with the laundry under one arm and dishes to return to the dining room balanced on his clipboard. In the basement Tietjen dropped the clothes in the room they had made over as the laundry—a utility room with a floor drain, slop sink, and sufficient space to string clotheslines—and signed himself up for a shift on laundry duty later in the day. Then he went upstairs to the dining room. Elena and one of her helpers were already working on breakfast: dry cereal, canned fruit, coffee. Tietjen said good morning, took his dishes out into the alley where the washing water was, and began to wash them and the other waiting dishes.

  “You don’t got to do that,” Elena said from the doorway. She was looking at him a little sideways, not suspiciously but curiously.

  Tietjen shook his head. “You let me get away with too much, Elena. It’s only a couple of dishes.”

  She shrugged and went back inside. Tietjen felt a little ashamed as he washed the last couple of plates. He didn’t remember the last time he’d washed a dish or hung up laundry or swept a floor. No one complained, but the others let him get away with behaving like the Boss and leaving the scutwork to other people. He’d have to talk with Barbara about it.

  It was early; people were only beginning to wake and come down for breakfast, and Tietjen didn’t see Barbara among them. He wasn’t hungry yet, and he was filled with energy. He wanted work. As he headed back down to the laundry room, he wondered again: why do I feel so good? It was like—he tried to remember when he had last felt this kind of elation and physical energy and bounce. In college, maybe. Or when I first met Irene. It felt like the morning-after-the-first-night buzz of a new relationship.

  Wrestling with his sheets, Tietjen realized that the last time he’d done laundry was with a machine. They had taken the washing machines and dryers out of the room and moved in two big tubs. Tietjen sloshed clean waste water into one of them, dropped in a dollop of detergent, and began to stir his sheets around in the tub. He didn’t really know what he was doing, and felt clumsy and stupid, in a cheerful, adventurous way. As he worked he looked at the blotches of mold on the baseboards of the ugly green walls. “Bleach,” he thought. “Maybe I can find some when I’m done here.” He was trying to wring water out of a sheet, six or seven inches at a time, without letting the squeezed part drop on the floor or fall back into the sink, when he heard a chuckle behind him.

  “If I hadn’t seen it, I would never believe it,” Barbara said.

  “Here, you’re making a mess of it.” She took the sheet from him, then offered him back a corner. “Stand over the floor drain. Okay, now: open the sheet, fold it once—that’s it. Now, twist.” Between the two of them they had the sheet wrung and hanging on the line in a few moments. “Whatever possessed you to do laundry at this hour of the morning? It’s not as if you have an aptitude for it,” she added. She was smiling, but Tietjen thought she look ti
red.

  “I woke up feeling good this morning, and I realized I’ve been getting away with not doing my share around here.” Tietjen washed the second sheet in the tub energetically.

  Barbara snorted. “Are you trying to persuade me that you don’t work hard enough?”

  “I’m saying it finally dawned on me that I don’t do a lot of the routine junk like the laundry and cooking and—”

  “John, you clearly don’t know how to do wash—”

  “And I couldn’t be taught? I feel like I’m being given preferential treatment. I’m surprised no one here has wrung my neck for it.”

  The second sheet came out of the sink, was wrung and hung to dry between them. Tietjen had to step around the corner of the sheet to see Barbara’s face. She was reaching up, smoothing out fine wrinkles in the sheet as she listened.

  “Look, can you honestly tell me you haven’t let me get away with not doing kitchen duty, or laundry duty, or cleaning the toilets, because—”He broke off, distracted. He flushed suddenly and wasn’t sure why. Something about Barbara or the way she looked. Something.

  “Because?” she repeated. She turned to face him. After a second she stepped back and raised her hand to her cheek. “What?” she asked. “Have I got a smudge on my nose?” She brushed at her nose, smiling uneasily. The jade ring on her ring finger caught the light.

  “Have you always worn that ring?” he asked.

  Barbara nodded. “Gordon gave it to me. It was his grandmother’s. Why?”

  Memories filled Tietjen like tides. Every touch, every sensation of the night’s dream came back to him and he felt drowned in it. He turned away from Barbara, hoping she wouldn’t see what the memories were doing to him.

  “John? You okay?” Barbara put her hand on his shoulder to turn him back to her; her hand was only inches from his face. He remembered clearly how that hand touched him in the night. He kept his body turned away from her, embarrassed by his erection. “I had a dream with your ring in it last night,” he said, as lightly as he could, and pulled away, went around the corner of the sheet again. This time it was Tietjen who reached up to smooth away a wrinkle, buying time, willing the memories to go away.

  “A dream?” She sounded doubtful, a little shaky herself.

  Tietjen made himself laugh. “Yeah. I don’t remember anything else, just that there was someone wearing that ring.” He pulled the clothesline low enough so that he could smile at her over it. Barbara’s answering smile was wary; he imagined her lips tracing the skin along his ribs. He let go of the clothesline and it snapped up a few inches, hiding his face. “Ooops,” he muttered. If he didn’t look at her he could get the feelings under control, he thought.

  He spoke more loudly than necessary. “Anyway, can you really tell me that you don’t give me special treatment because—” He stopped. He had been talking about special treatment because he was the Boss; maybe that wasn’t it at all.

  “Because why?” Barbara asked. She stepped around to his side of the sheet and faced him. “No one asks you to sew or cook or wash because no one thinks you’d be any good at it, and you’re very good at a lot of other things. That’s the reason.” She stepped closer, and Tietjen was suddenly aware of how small she was, slight and fine-boned and delicate; there were freckles between her breasts.

  “It’s not anything else?” Leave it alone, he thought. Leave it alone. But the question hung between them like something tangible.

  She began to sound irritated. “Like what else?”

  Tietjen took a step back. “It was just a dream,” he heard himself murmur. He thought it was a non sequitur, but it wasn’t to Barbara. She looked as if he’d struck her.

  “What?”

  “Nothing. I was thinking about your ring again. It was nothing.”

  “What the hell was the dream, John?”

  Tietjen still couldn’t look at her. He felt like a kid caught with a dirty magazine, like he had double vision, seeing her as Barbara, as always, and knowing her as the woman in the dream.

  “God, Barbara, look, whatever I was dreaming about last night, I hope you don’t think I think of you—I’d never—the last thing I want is to—” He was making it worse, he could see by her look.

  “I had a dream last night, too,” she said coldly. “It was my dream. I—I don’t know how you know about it, but if that’s what this is about … If you’re down here snickering at me, if it grosses you out, that’s your tough luck. I’m not going to apologize: it was just a dream.”

  Tietjen felt like he’d back into another nightmare, one of those where he walked in halfway and didn’t know his lines. He wasn’t sure what they were arguing about. “I—it wasn’t—I wasn’t laughing at the anything. I didn’t mean—did I hurt you? I’m sorry, but Jesus, Barbara, that wasn’t what—” He heard himself go on, not saying what he meant, too confused to be sure what she wanted.

  She turned and left the laundry room.

  Tietjen sank to his haunches with his head against the cool damp of a hanging sheet, trying to figure out what had happened. The marvelous feeling of that morning, the feeling of pleasure and possibility, of being loved, had dissipated. He had had a dream that—that Barbara was in love with him? Something. And Barbara had had the same dream, and was angry. Why? Because of a dream? Because he knew something about her that she didn’t want known, he thought. Because now he could hurt her. Already had.

  He was frightened. He had to talk with Barbara, get this all straightened out. They needed her, the Store couldn’t do without her. Just imagining it—the Store without Barbara—made him feel cold and panicky.

  He couldn’t do without her.

  He thought of Irene and Ketch, of his sons and Allan Hochman and Maia. “No.” The word wrenched out of him. I’ve lost enough, I’ve lost too damned much. I’ll find her and figure out what’s going on and we’ll get it sorted out, he promised himself. I can’t lose Barbara. He got to his feet and smoothed the sheets absently, waiting until he felt centered enough to go upstairs.

  Barbara was not in the dining room, but Sandy Hochman was, with a list of questions about the plumbing. Tietjen let himself sit down long enough to have a cup of coffee—which turned into two cups and some breakfast—as Sandy, then Lo-yi, then Elena brought questions to him. He sat and answered for over an hour.

  The first flush of fear that he would lose McGrath had faded. Irene and Ketch and Maia had all died; Barbara was in the Store and safe. There was time, he thought, and finished his coffee. He needed to think a little more about what had happened in the laundry room, not go to her half-cocked as he used to with Irene.

  “John?” It was Sandy Hochman again. “We’ve isolated the problem in the D line; Paulo thinks he can fix it with the Super’s plumbing tools, but do you want to take a look first?”

  Tietjen rose and said sure. A sewage problem was potentially disastrous but far easier to face and fix. He would talk to Barbara later, when they had both had time to cool down.

  Something woke Jit in the cool tunnel where he slept most mornings, something strong enough to reach out to him. For a moment he was scared; his heart beat as fast as a squirrel’s and there was a buzzing in his ears. Gable back? he thought. Can’t be no Gable back. Jit had seen Gable’s broken body himself, had spat into the gaping mouth and thrown back at the dead man all claim of kinship. Gable was dead, but something had woken Jit now, something strong.

  Jit rolled up to sitting and blinked to let his eyes get accustomed to the dark of the tunnel. With his mind Jit swept the city, coming last to the place where the Man and his people were. There were no new voices, no one with power like Gable’s. Maybe the strong voice that woke him had been Jit’s own, in a dream. He touched the Man, found him confused, with the memory of the Old Woman’s dream sighing through him. Then Jit touched the Old Woman.

  At once he knew that this was what he had heard, her anger and sorrow distilled into one roar of pain. Through her eyes he saw her room, the neatly tucked corner of th
e bed she sat on, the piece of flowered sheet she kneaded as she thought. She was angry at the Man, she was angry at herself. If Icould die, Jit heard her thoughts. If I could die and just never have to see him again. At first, Jit did not understand the anger. The Man knew something about the Old Woman. Something about the dream he had given to Tee-jin the night before had given him power over the Old Woman. At least she thought so.

  Jit began to understand. The Old Woman had loved the Man. The Man must have pushed her away. Jit knew that feeling. Now she hated the Man. And loved him. And hated herself. The Old Woman’s feelings were like a storm, blowing everywhere at once in every direction. Jit pushed her rage; it burned hotter in response. “Idiot. Stupid cruel emotionless self-involved idiot,” she muttered.

  The anger felt like a line between the two of them, Jit and the Old Woman, as if it tied them together and made them one. Cautiously, Jit reached deeper, pushed the anger again, felt the knot strengthen. He pushed the shame and the knot strengthened. And he swept the love away, imagined a door for the Old Woman and put the love there, where it would not interfere with him. Then he tried something else.

  “Bastard,” he said aloud. “Bastard!” she whispered.

  Then Jit mimed tearing something, tearing hard enough to kill. The Old Woman took the sheet she had been twisting between her hand and tore it. Jit wiped his brow; the Old Woman wiped hers. Jit pushed the anger again and she shook with it. Jit smiled; the Old Woman smiled too, with tears coursing down her face.

  He had a weapon.

  Jit hesitated; he hated the Man, but the Old Woman had been nice, had spoken gently to him, had given Jit a coat. Her voice had been funny, gentle, sad and curious; with the anger pushing everything else out of the way, all that was gone. But Jit hated the Man, and now she did too, and it was so good to share that. To have a weapon.