Time showed how many things could go wrong on the way to a handshake. How much of a botch the FHA could make of a simple loan application. How badly a husband and wife could disagree with each other, without knowing it. How many people could choke at the last minute, even while putting pen to the closing papers.
It took her a while to figure out just how much chaff you have to scatter on your way to making a wheat bagel. But even after a few years on the job, she always figured that things were meant to work out. You had to keep at it, of course. That kept things interesting. But every seller had his buyer, given the right agent. And in her mind, Laura was always anybody’s right agent, if they gave her a chance.
The person who once thought as much is dead. She dies the day Laura wakes up and doesn’t want coffee. Doesn’t want to look at the morning Post-Chronicle. The day that she decides Lindsey is right. She wouldn’t go in to the office now even if they called her back to sandbag a flash flood of clients.
Her fourth chemo makes the others seem like little starter bungalows. For the first time, she’s not ready to go home by the time they make her. Alan gives her the name of the exorbitant anti-nausea pills. She tells Dr. Archer, who looks into it. But Billing says that insurance will only pay the usual and customary treatment.
Laura begs. “The customary isn’t working. Don’t they have to pay for a treatment that works?”
“We can give you the expensive ones,” Billing says. “But you’ll have to pay for the difference.”
She takes a look at her savings. She calculates as well as she can: two more treatments, plus a couple rallying months, minimum, before she can think about any money coming in again. She sets a little aside, for anything else that her comprehensive insurance might not cover. Then she buys two weeks’ worth of pills.
Two nights after she comes back home, her daughter throws open her bedroom door in the middle of the night. Ellen, clutching at the throat of her nightgown. Panting, “Are you all right?”
Laura cannot say anything. She cannot sit up. She cannot drag herself to the bathroom to retch. There is nothing in her, not even saliva anymore. Nothing to spew up and ruin the sheets. She feels light, insubstantial, emptied, yet sick beyond imagining. Too sick even to lie to her daughter. To affirm.
“Mom, you were, like, groaning. Should I call the doctor?”
“You should kill the doctor.”
Ellen wavers in the doorway, paralyzed.
“I’m sorry, sweetie. No. Don’t do anything. Just . . . just shut the door.”
When morning comes again, she feels a little better. At least she can turn herself over, let the mattress punish some other junction of her body. She does not go downstairs. She thinks about calling Ruthie at home. She can’t. Can’t bear learning how things are with her.
She stays in bed until late morning. The sound of a voice downstairs gets her up. Tim. She looks at the clock. Close to eleven, on a Monday. Don was right. Who was she kidding? The kids should go to his place, permanently, until this ordeal is over.
She forces herself up and into a wrapper. Her bones push up against her ulcerating skin. Her steps are small rug burns. She works her way down the stairwell, the Sherpas lost somewhere near the summit.
At sea level, she finds what she feared: Tim glued to the computer, only five hours too early.
“What are you doing?” she demands. First words of the day. The attempt at authority comes out sounding phlegmy, fuzzy.
“Hi, Mom. I’m the Portuguese. We’re just about to develop Steel Making.”
“You what?”
“Hey, give me a break. The day is young. At least I’m wiping Rosen’s butt. His Americans are still in caravels. I almost pity him.”
“Timothy Bodey.”
“I know, I know.” He laughs. “Don’t worry. I’m letting him live. I need an ally against the Mesopotamians. That’s Doug Harper. He’s like halfway to Fusion already. They had a great starting position, lots of minerals, very fertile lands. But I still think he’s cheating his ass off, somehow.”
“Turn it off,” she snaps.
He swings around to face her. Like she’s hit him. “I can’t. There’s seven other guys who’ll kill me if—”
“What the hell do you think you’re doing? You think just because I’m sick you can do anything you damn well please? Turn it off and get to school. I’m through cutting you slack. You can take detention for a month, for all I care.”
“Mom.”
“Now! I’ve had it with your mouthing—” She moves toward the power strip. He stops her gently, one cupped, confiding hand on her upper arm. Her first glimpse of the man this boy will be.
“Mom. It’s Columbus Day.”
She hangs in the air in front of him, powered down by confusion. She collapses into the hand that restrains her. “Timmy. I’m sorry.”
He forgives her, as much as a boy can understand forgiveness, suffering her hold for a minute before wriggling free. Only because she is emaciated, disoriented, still in a caravel. One of the world’s backward races.
She pretends to make breakfast, lunch, whatever meal she ought to be eating now. Not that Tim much cares whether she eats or not. It’s Ellen, her anorexic cheerleader, who goes to pieces when Laura doesn’t eat.
“Where’s your sister?” she asks, shooting for a return to the proper tones of midmorning.
But Tim has already returned to the greater tasks of international progress: steelmaking, electricity, flight, the next breakout hope. He shrugs his right shoulder while holding the mouse rock-steady. “Not sure.” If he does not get a job on the Joint Chiefs of Staff, perhaps he can land some hand-eye thing for the sedentarily dexterous.
She sits in the breakfast nook, wondering how to fill the day remaining to her. She should look over the insurance claim paperwork, to see what all they are refusing to pay for. She should catch up on all that personal correspondence, now that her back burner from work is all but cleared off.
But all she can do is sit. She looks out on her stubbled garden, the sparrows foraging for scraps of overlooked sustenance. After a while, the sounds of Tim’s new technologies bubbling up from out of the surrounding digital buckshot grow almost comforting.
“Who’s playing?” she calls out to him in the next room. He has hit some deceptive lull in the game, for he actually answers.
“Zulus, Germans, Portuguese, Babylonians. Mesopotamians, Russians, Polynesians, and Americans.”
She laughs to herself, dry little stabs. “I mean, what real people?”
A puzzled interruption of clicking. “What . . . ?”
“What boys?”
“Oh! Me, Rosen, Harper, Loftus—”
“Loftus? Paul Loftus? The managing director of . . . ?”
“No, Mom. That would be his father.”
“You know him? The son?”
“Never met him. He’s in eighth, I think.”
She wanders over to the computer, stands behind him. She watches as he boosts his research budget and throws his populace some bread and circuses to keep the Portuguese from revolting. “What’s the point?”
“Point? Of the game, you mean? Build the best civilization. Cream everyone else. Be the first to the cosmos.”
She samples the idea: her son, the son of the head of Clare Agricultural, and that alley rat Andy Rosen. Half a dozen other boys who have never met each other, racing one another to ever-higher levels of domination and mastery.
“Control the world?” she asks him.
He smiles without taking his eyes off the screen. “I wish. Be nice, wouldn’t it?”
“Is that what happens? What the winner gets?”
“Naw. Nobody ever gets that far ahead.”
“Can you talk to him? The Loftus boy? Can you type messages to him? Get him to answer you?”
“Mom. I’ve tried. I tried threatening him. I suggested a nonaggression pact. I even offered to teach him the secret of Rectilinear Perspective, which he doesn’t have, just to kee
p his men out of my face. He’s not responding to anything.”
Trade him for Chemistry. Ask him for Medicine. Develop the secret of Justice. See if he knows anything about a man named Jim Grandy or a woman named Ruth Tapelewsky.
Who will answer what the Loftuses won’t? She fishes a box of Clarity Pore Purifier out of storage in the linen closet. The bottom of the package bears the message: “For more information, write to the Consumer Products Support Center at: One Clare Plaza, Boston, MA 02109, or call us at 1-800 . . .”
She calls. It’s toll-free, anyway. She has no idea what she will say. No sense of what information she needs.
That turns out not to be a problem. Consumer Products presents her with a menu. “If you have inquiries about possible health complications with any Clare product, please press seven now.”
It’s the closest choice available, although it doesn’t have much to do with her question. They put her into a queue. The recording tells her that the people ahead of her have been waiting an average of ten minutes. While she’s holding, they play various songs from famous Clare commercials. A lozenge-throated narrator comes on every so often. He says things like, “Did you know that Clare’s first product was a soft soap made in Boston by two Clare brothers, over one hundred and sixty years ago?”
Finally the history teacher breaks off in mid-recording. The music stops, and someone says, “Welcome to Clare Health Information.”
“Yes,” she begins. “I was just wondering if anyone there can tell me—”
But the voice on the other end talks right over her. “If your question concerns the Clarity Cosmetic line of products and animal testing, please press one now. If your question . . .”
She hangs up, anesthetized. Not even capable of disgust.
She can’t say how long she has been holding, all told. In the computer room, Tim is still playing away. He’s well into the Industrial Age, whatever comes after the Industrial Age. Laura checks the community calendar that hangs on the white board by the phone. The public library is open, despite the school holiday. Columbus has definitely been going downhill in recent years.
“Hey, chum,” she calls to Tim, gathering her purse. “Want to go for a walk?”
“Mom, they’ll take me apart. By the time we come back, there’ll be nothing left of me.”
“Come on. Let’s go to the library. Libraries are major civilization advances.”
“Tell me about it. I build one in each of my cities. They’re great for boosting your research and development.”
“Come on. They’ll have the newest computer magazines.”
“Can I just . . . ? I just have to do this one thing. Theory of Evolution. It’ll give me . . .”
She looks down upon the crown of his head. The head that almost killed her in appearing. She wants to pet down his cowlick, but does not. Endless civilization advances, and we can do everything but live.
“It’s okay,” she tells him. “Meet me over there.”
She walks the six blocks to the old Carnegie Public. There ought to be a holiday, every year, National Biped Day. A day when people have to walk everywhere. The air is cool and crisp, like those sere Octobers when she was a girl, with their brace of revealing breezes that always whispered excitedly of some approaching trip, some discovery in store for her. She walks at a fraction of her normal speed, so she can catch her breath every three steps. But also so that no revelation can slip past her without her noticing.
By the time she reaches the library, it’s like she’s twelve again and studying for that school field trip to Washington, D.C. Once, those field trips promised to return forever, one a year, each farther-ranging than the last. When she was young, she thought she would one day go to France, where all the schoolgirls got to wear uniforms and huddle about chanting gossipy singsong and looking like Madeline. Now she’ll settle for walking across town.
Once at the library, she is lost. She browses the shelves at random, up and down the rows like a tractor, until she sees titles that seem to be about disease. She finds a big book on cancer, but it’s dated 1972. A smaller but newer one has no more than a page and a half on her variety. It goes over the stages and grades, all the stuff she already knows. As far as causes, it says even less than Dr. Archer.
She has this grade-school flashback to the card catalog, the place where she should have started. She tries Cancer, Chemicals, Environment, Toxicity. A few promising titles. But nothing gives her quite what she is after.
She goes to the front desk. The librarian on duty is that sandy-haired twenty-something woman, the one Laura always thinks of as Marian. Laura studies the woman’s face for the first time. Frightened, pretty, competent. A little tired, spent too soon, precocious world-weariness. It’s hard to imagine her making it much past thirty.
“Could you help me?” she begins.
The woman nods, but Laura cannot think how to go on. The librarian appraises Laura’s color, her scarf. Laura wants to ask her, in her own words, before Marian starts to draw inferences.
“I’d like to find out whatever I can about ovarian cancer.”
The woman nods again, slower, deeper. “Yes. Here. I’ll show you,” she says. That simple. She walks Laura over to a table filled with forbidding-looking volumes. She shows Laura how to use the abstracts and indexes: whole, bound lists of pointers to things in print. Someone else has already done the legwork for her.
She never dreamed that such stuff existed. Beyond belief, really. A person might be able to find anything she wants, all organized, all laid out. Every entry, already an expert. You don’t have to start at zero each time.
The librarian teaches Laura how to read the links and symbols. The headings zoom in more exactly than Laura thought possible. Not just cancer: cystadenocarcinoma.
Laura sees the specialist in Indianapolis’s name on one of the articles. She sticks the crescent of her thumbnail just under the citation and looks up at Marian.
“Where do you keep these?”
The librarian blushes with embarrassment. “Oh. We’re way too small to carry those kind of journals. You’ll have to go to a real reference library somewhere. The college might have this one. But probably not.”
Laura’s hopes collapse again. Why stock the indexes at all, then? Knowledge is to people what small boys and magnifying glasses are to ants.
“Here,” the woman says again, more brightly. “Let’s try the computer.” She takes Laura to a terminal, where they repeat the whole sadistic process. The electronic indexes make the print ones seem like stone and chisel. Here they just type in a few key words—ovary, carcinoma, causes—and the computer gives them back not only titles but whole pages. Actual information.
They print out two pieces that look interesting. “Where is all this coming from?” Laura asks.
“It’s coming in from over the network.”
“I see.” She smiles to herself, more ignorant than ever. If she clicked enough buttons on this box, could she break into Tim’s game? Shower her little Portuguese Alexander the Great in revolutionary leaflets?
“Can we try something else? Can we check the names of some chemicals? See whether . . . ?”
“Oh,” Marian says. “Oh.”
This time she does not say. Does not say “Here.” This time she goes to a stand of gunmetal-gray cabinets marked “Newspaper Clippings Archive” and “Vertical File.” She retrieves a pudgy file and hands it to Laura. “Industrial By-products and Health, Lacewood and Sawgak Counties.”
Every article that has passed through the Carnegie Public, saved up and held for her in one clean folder. Laura clasps the data, debilitated, queasy with its heft.
Marian is looking at her. “That’s it, isn’t it? What you were after?”
It is exactly what she was after. Laura fixes on Marian’s gaze and takes a chance.
“Do . . . sick people come here often?” The question that no index indexes. “I mean, do a lot of people come in looking for . . . ?” She taps the file, the top
article, something about chlorinated solvents. The folder weighs down her lap. She could not stand if she wanted to.
Marian’s eyes sweep upward, studying that spot near the ceiling where the human calculator tape prints out its subtotals. “Umm . . . every few days?” she tries. “Yes. I’d say pretty much every few days.”
23. Burmeister, L. F. “Selected Cancer Mortality and Farm Practices in Iowa.”
41. Crump, K. S., and H. A. Guess. “Drinking Water and Cancer: Review of Recent Epidemiological Findings and Assessment of Risks.”
126. Henschler, D. “Carcinogenicity Testing—Existing Protocols Are Insufficient.”
178. Maltoni, C., and I. Selikoff. “Living in a Chemical World: Occupational and Environmental Significance of Industrial Pollution.”
293. Zahm, F. H. “Herbicides and Cancer: Review and Discussion of Methodological Issues.”
To sidestep bankruptcy in the late 1870s, the firm needed to grow. It had to expand rapidly into the vacuum created by the collapse of cottage industry. The times required it to swell at least as fast as human expectation. But growth, as always, cost. The secret of making money, now even more than ever, was to have it already.
A firm’s worth came down to how much it could borrow. Peter and Douglas devised a plan whereby the firm would borrow its way out of debt. They needed a way to placate, if not pay off, the firm’s three main creditors: the railroads, their suppliers, and Clare’s own employees, whom the firm had long forced to buy up obligations, dollar by half dollar.
The board approved a new, public bond issue. But the R. G. Dun and Co. mercantile agency’s threat to downgrade its creditworthiness for the first time in the company’s history chilled public enthusiasm. Clare had to generate some ready money, to prove itself a worthy borrower.
Douglas sold the archaic Roxbury works for a lump sum, perhaps half what the equipment and buildings were worth. In one sweep, he reduced much of the fat in the budget that had edged Clare toward default. Modern Walpole made twice the soap with half the jobs. The Roxbury soap girls, once the marvel of progressive Boston for garlanding their productivity with ad hoc factory literary journals, had to find another world in which to peddle their labor and their verse.
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