New Wave Fabulists

by Bradford Morrow

  And then the words vanished and were replaced with another message. Do you wish to play again?

  What I wished was that I had The Adventures of Link. But before I could get bitter, the phone rang. “This is really embarrassing,” my mom said. “There was a little trouble at the demonstration. We’ve been arrested.”

  “Arrested for what?” I asked.

  “Assault. Mayhem. Crimes of a violent nature. None of the charges will stick. We were attacked by a group of nazi frat boys and I did nothing but defend myself. You know me. Only thing is, Dusty is in no mood to cut me any slack. I don’t think I’m getting out tonight. What a vindictive bastard he’s turned out to be!”

  “Are you all right?”

  “Oh, yeah. Hardly a scratch.” There was a lot of noise in the background. I could just make out Tamara, she was singing that Merle Haggard song “Mama Tried.” “There’s a whole bunch of us here,” my mother said. “It’s the crime of the century. I might get my picture in the paper. Anyway, Victor wasn’t arrested. You know Victor. So he’s on his way to stay with you tonight. I just wanted you to hear from me yourself.”

  I didn’t like to think of her spending the night in jail, even if it did sound like a slumber party over there. I could already hear Victor’s car pulling up out front. I was glad he was staying; I wouldn’t have liked to be alone all night. Sometime in the dark I’d have started thinking about nuns with hooks for hands. Now I could see him through the window and he was carrying a pizza. Good on Victor! “Just as long as you’re all right,” I told her.

  “I must say you’re being awfully nice about this,” my mother said.

  Abduction

  Paul Park

  THESE CREATURES—I HESITATE to call them people—since my capture they have taken away my rights. I sit and sit. The screens can be manipulated and changed, so in the library I go as far back as I can, looking for something I can hold in my hand. Last week I read a book almost two hundred years old. When they talked about the mowers in the corn, how all the animals and bugs were pressed into a shrinking space—that’s a description of where I used to live. Is it any wonder we bolted when we should have stayed, surrendered when we should have fought? Two hundred years ago the farmers carried scythes and flails in their own hands. Later it was all machines—no hunger and no blood lust either. Robots and automata step by my door.

  This was in what used to be known as British Columbia. I won’t tell you the place—there was a lot of open country. But even when I first arrived, the woods were full of people who’d been chased there from all over. Women, like me, who’d been abused as children. Lesbians and straight—almost my first night, I went up to the youth hostel and got into a conversation with a man at the campfire. There’d been some northern lights. Just as easily as telling me his name, he started into a story about how a space ship had landed in his back yard, big as his house. The pilot was someone he already knew, someone who was working to save us. Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and Abraham Lincoln were all members of this same race, living undercover. They kept installations at the magnetic poles to prevent the world from tilting on its axis.

  He was a large man with a pleasant face, sitting on a rock. Later I got to know him before he moved away, and he would tell me versions of the same story any time I liked. Maybe he felt he had to keep working on it because he could never get it to sound like the truth. Or maybe he was making conversation—to believe, not to believe, it’s not really required when you listen to most things.

  But just because it’s easy to make fun of stupidity doesn’t mean there isn’t something there. The first knowledge I got, the first sniff of something real, came from my job.

  For a long time I’d been on relief because of my disability. I’d pick my checks up once a month at the post office. When the laws changed, I had to go to work at the new settlement. We all had to go to work. My best friend, Rose, used to shoot some of her own food. But they took her shotgun away and put her to work planting trees. Cold, dead hands, she’d said, but there she was, bending over in the evening mist, her bag full of seedlings.

  I saw her from the window of the bus. Because of my disability, I’d chosen domestic work. They picked us up in front of the store and took us to the place down a new logging road. We were in a battered yellow school bus. Like most people, I’d gotten the ligation when I went for government assistance. There weren’t many children in our town. So it felt strange to be bouncing on the long mud ruts, my dinner in a brown bag, going to someplace new, and there were a lot of leaves and crumpled-up pieces of paper on the floor. It was the beginning of September, dark at seven o’clock or so. The driver turned on the dome lights as we came through the gate. Or else it’s not a gate but a disturbance in the air. You can see a shimmering over the mud and feel something in your teeth, even though they turned the current off. There’s a firebreak in the trees on either side.

  When I got off that bus the first time, I needed some information, because it was hard for me to make sense of what I was seeing. This was in a place I’d lived for most of my life. I’d moved to Canada with my husband twenty years before. We’d had a lot of reasons—food additives, computerized commercials, manipulated images. Then Stephen moved away and used to write me from Milwaukee, but nothing he said made me want to join him there. Instead, my friend Rose helped me build my house in the woods, where there was a real community. But we were isolated, too. When the world came to us, we weren’t equipped to understand it very well—I see that now. Maybe there’s no one who understands more than bits and pieces, and everything is just a tiny piece of something else. Nothing ever changes, and then you look back and it’s different. It’s true I did have trouble sleeping, and terrible, strange dreams. I woke up feeling drugged and tired, and sometimes I’d have earaches or ringing in my ears. Sometimes I’d have bruises, and painful menstruations, and sore genitals that couldn’t be explained.

  I spoke to Rose the next morning. “They’ve clear-cut in a circle about half a mile in diameter. Above your head it looks like sky, but I don’t think it is. I think we came in through an invisible wall, and there was a pressure on the inside. You could feel it in your ears. There wasn’t any breeze. Smells—there was an antiseptic, hospital kind of smell, very faint. It never really got dark. You couldn’t see the stars.”

  “And what was inside?”

  “Grass. The road changed to a surface like poured concrete, and then ended in a circle. There were some white, square, stucco buildings that looked prefabricated.”

  We were sitting in Rose’s house. It had an octagonal cupola on top, a sleeping loft with windows on all sides. She’d lit the stove and we were having some mint tea, sitting side by side on the daybed. I was looking at her boots and shoes, lined up perfectly along the drying slat—typical Virgo, I thought, not for the first time. There was just the one room.

  “And … ?”

  “We went inside. There are four apartments in each building, two on a floor. I went upstairs to meet my family—I’m going to be helping them. Cooking, cleaning, looking after the kiddies. You know.”

  “It’s degrading.”

  I shrugged. “I’ve done worse,” I said, which wasn’t exactly true. Because of the focusing disorder, my work history has been kind of spotty.

  “So?” she said, and I realized I’d been letting the conversation die, settling into long pauses while I looked stupidly at her boots, the bare studs of the wall, the tar paper showing through the knotholes, and the short, patternless tips of the nails. Rose was my best friend, but to tell the truth, I’ve never been much good at explaining things, talking to people. So maybe it was my fault when she started to get the wrong idea. I sat rubbing my face and staring at the long oak floorboards that she’d stolen from someplace, and which I had helped her sand, stain, and polyurethane in fifteen much-diluted coats.

  She took the cups to the sink and washed them, then slid them into the wooden drying rack, otherwise empty. I sat looking at her scrawny back
in the orange shirt they’d given her, while in my mind I was trying to think about my new family, whom I’d met for the first time the evening before.

  The father was named Mr. Kang, a tall, thin man. He never smiled. He always wore a business suit. He was bald, with a weak chin, flat nose, and black slanted eyes. He stood very close to me, and I had to look up at his hairless face, the skin so smooth and shiny it was like porcelain. It had a greenish tinge. Because I was working for him, he thought he owned me, owned my body. Even that first night he put his long hand on my back as he showed me the washing machine. He brushed against my breast, and I was terrified—no.

  Here in my jail cell, I have time to think. For a few months this was part of my memory, part of my dreams, how he used to push me against the wall. But wouldn’t I have told Rose the next morning, wouldn’t I have complained, and wouldn’t she have comforted me? Memories can be inserted like fertilized eggs. Whenever I picture Mr. Kang in my mind, he is always arrogant, distant, cold. Except for the last time, when he was hurt and bleeding—no.

  “I met the father first,” I said, looking at Rose’s gray hair, tied at the nape of her neck. She washed the cups, laid them in the rack, then dried them, put them away in the high cupboard. I could see neat rows of jars and bottles.

  “What was he like?”

  I shivered. “It’s like he’s not real. His face is like a mask, and you never know what he’s thinking. His voice is soft, like a whisper. He gave me the worst creeps.”

  Did I really say these things? I looked at the empty gun rack by the door. Rose dried her hands, then rolled down her sleeves and buttoned them. Her wrists were long and thin.

  “Oh, but the child,” I said. “She is a darling. Oh, my God, I feel sorry for her. It’s like she’s in a cage and doesn’t know it. You should just see her, she is so sweet.”

  Rose took off her glasses, washed the lenses, and polished them. “What kind of a place is it?” she asked. “I mean, what are they doing here?”

  I shrugged. “It’s for executives. It’s a paid vacation or a reward. He’s got some kind of transmitter, so he can still be at the office, which is in Hong Kong. He’s up all night, then he goes fishing. It’s for the wife and child, he told me. The girl—Opal—she has asthma. There are some other kids, and they play together. There’s a nice play structure.”

  One way to talk about Rose would be to say that she was paranoid about authority. Otherwise you could say she was made up of circles or concentric spheres. Outside, the yard is a mess: overgrown, full of broken cars and machines. The paint is peeling, the tar paper is rotting, and the house looks like a shack. Then inside there’s not a grain of dust. But she herself doesn’t bathe much, and her clothes are pretty dirty. If you touch her, she gets tense. But she’d do anything for me, as I found out.

  Now she rearranged her glasses on her sharp nose. “Let’s go see.”

  “What?”

  “I want to see. It’s not so far away.”

  “I don’t think we’re allowed.”

  But she never cared about that. She pulled on her socks and boots, closed down the stove. Then she was out through the ripped screen door, while I tied my own laces. I heard her firing up the truck, a rusted old Dodge, though the inside was swept out.

  I was surprised she wanted to waste the energy. She knew all the old roads through the woods. We came into the place through the back side, and walked half a mile through the spruce trees. I showed her where the play structure was, on the other side of the wavy, shimmery line. The kids were all out, and I don’t think they could see us, though we stood a hundred feet away.

  “There she is,” I said. Opal was sitting by herself on a swing, a little girl in a red sweater.

  “She doesn’t look Chinese,” Rose said.

  Was it then that she first told me “You’ve got the same coloring”? No, that’s not it exactly. “She must take after her mother.”

  I shook my head. Then we stood staring for a little while longer next to the wavy line. Rose had a greedy look. As I say, we hadn’t seen many children in that area.

  The truth is, women have been kidnapped and violated, the eggs stripped out of their bodies. They have been subjected to cruel tests by expressionless monsters. Over and over again they tell the same story, which had come out of therapy sessions with a psychiatrist at Harvard University. Rose showed me a copy of the book. The cover was gone, because it was sixty years old and had been passed from hand to hand so many times.

  Rose laughed at the inconsistencies, but I couldn’t tell what she was thinking. She was trying to be supportive. When I told her some of my stories, suddenly it turned out she had more than one book on this subject. I was surprised because I’d never seen anything to read in her little house, even though like me she’d been to college a long time before. Now she showed me an illustrated book of some woman’s experiences: the reimplantation process, the generations of hybrids in their crèche, each one closer to humanity.

  I had been telling her about my nightmares. Babies and children stolen away—“Do you believe this stuff?” she asked.

  “No.”

  “Me neither. It’s just a fantasy to get people through menopause. Women who haven’t had any children and are thinking about it now.” She showed me a picture of a naked woman on her back in a doctor’s office, tubes up her nose, while the alien put his hands inside of her. “It’s just a metaphor.”

  I thought this was a cruel thing to say. If she wanted to reassure me, she didn’t succeed. Didn’t it all turn out to be true, almost, in cold fact? I remembered how on aurora borealis nights, sometimes I’d made fun of the fat man with his space ships. Now I was too horrified to read the story printed on the page. Nothing is more credible than printed words, and nothing is more personal than a woman’s story of her own distress. I too had crippling headaches, and a burning sensation beneath my right eye. I too am susceptible, easily hypnotized.

  “It’s a way of blaming other people for our own choices,” Rose said. “Everyone is a victim.” Later: “I swear she looks just like you. She could be your daughter.”

  “Who?”

  “Opal.”

  “Don’t say that.”

  But it was true. The child had my yellow hair, blue eyes. Over the days I had gotten to be friends with her mother, a dark-skinned woman of the type that used to be known as African-American. She was a hesitant, shy woman about twenty-eight years old, and her name was Emily Blaine. She wasn’t used to having someone work for her, and sometimes I would find her vacuuming as I arrived. Other times she would make me coffee, ask me to sit, while Opal watched the screens. “I’m lonely here,” she said.

  I was surprised they’d stayed so long. When the job was first explained to me, I was made to think I’d have a different family every week.

  “I hate this weather,” she said. “It’s so cold in these mountains.”

  What weather was she talking about? The air seemed warmer inside the settlement. A strange, white glow came from the window. “Mr. Kang is very frustrated,” she said. “He thinks he’s being punished.”

  Normally I didn’t say much during these conversations. I thought if I said nothing, after a while, Emily would break down and tell me the truth, that Mr. Kang was physically violent to her. Once I had seen a bruise on Emily’s arm.

  I looked in through the doorway to where Opal was sitting on the carpet, surrounded by the flowing screens. Even there were images above her head. The sound was a low whisper. A pretty blonde girl with bleached skin, she sat inside a glowing box.

  “I swear it’s like a jail here,” Emily continued. “You don’t know how lucky you are. No one tells my husband anything—it makes him crazy. Then he blames her and me.”

  “Why?”

  She shrugged. “It’s not rational. Maybe she’s not perfect. You only get the one chance.”

  We were sitting in the kitchen drinking coffee. We sat on plastic stools. I hadn’t tasted coffee in fifteen years, but I wa
s liking it now. I had washed the floor that morning, which hadn’t taken long. I’d scarcely had to rinse out the sponge.

  “Is she your child?”

  Emily gave me an angry look. “What do you mean?”

  I didn’t answer. Her talk went someplace else, then it came back. “I know up here you live like animals. It’s not like that for us—we couldn’t get a permit for a son. We didn’t want anyone who looked like me. So we settled for an actress in an old movie.”

  The screens went dark, and Opal came running out. I’d left the vacuum cleaner on the floor, and I don’t think she could see it till her eyes adjusted. She tripped over the hose and barked her skin, tore her white stockings—there were tears. Emily ran to her and gathered her up, kissed her, comforted her, while I sat with my hand on the polished surface of the table. She was always tender with that girl, I thought.

  Rose told me to write down my dreams. “They’re trying to teach you something,” she said. “If you write them down, they’ll get more real.”

  That was so stupid, it makes me angry even now. What was happening to me at night, I called it dreaming just to make it less frightening. But I was standing in my own flesh. Here’s something I wrote down dutifully near the end of September: I came home late at night from work, and my headache was so bad I had to smoke a joint to get to sleep. I wasn’t even aware of lying down. But there was a white light outside my window and when I opened the door, I could see the shadows of the trees thrown back. There was a frost, and the leaves were dry under my feet. I walked out into the light and I could see the men, see their shadows coming toward me. Then as usual they forced me down on my stomach, put something in my mouth, fastened my hands. I must have lost consciousness, and when I woke up I was on a metal table with my cheek flat against it. Doctors stood around me, and I could see them in the mirrored wall. They had scalpels made of colored lasers, and they were making incisions all along my back, so that they could look inside and probe me with their fingers. They wore masks and rubber gloves. I couldn’t feel anything, even though I knew they were touching the deep cuts, shining their lights inside. I could hear a hissing sound like gas escaping, and the beating of my heart.