The Year's Best SF 13 # 1995

by Gardner Dozois (ed)

  A hasty note by Kelly’s fourth-grade teacher mentioned that her “real father” had died in a car accident the previous summer and that the Notice slip could be ignored. A scrawled message on the bottom of the social worker’s typed page of comments let it be known that Kelly Dahl’s “stepfather” was the usual live-in boyfriend and was out on parole after sticking up a convenience store in Arvada.

  A fairly normal file.

  But there was nothing normal about little Kelly Dahl. These past few days, as I actively try to recall our interactions during the seven months of that abbreviated school year and the eight months we spent together when she was a junior in high school, I am amazed at how strange our time together had been. Sometimes I can barely remember the faces or names of any of the other sixth graders that year, or the sullen faces of the slouching juniors five years after that, just Kelly Dahl’s ever-thinning face and startling green eyes, Kelly Dahl’s soft voice—ironic at eleven, sarcastic and challenging at sixteen. Perhaps, after twenty-six years teaching, after hundreds of eleven-year-olds and sixteen-year-olds and seventeen-year-olds and eighteen-year-olds taught—suffered through, actually—Kelly Dahl had been my only real student.

  And now she was stalking me. And I her.

  II. Pentimento

  I awoke to the warmth of flames on my face. Lurching with a sense of falling, I remembered my last moment of consciousness—driving the Jeep into the pit, the plunge into blackness. I tried to raise my arms, grab the wheel again, but my arms were pinned behind me. I was sitting on something solid, not the Jeep seat, the ground. Everything was dark except for the flicker of flames directly in front of me. Hell? I thought, but there was not the slightest belief in that hypothesis, even if I were dead. Besides, the flames I could see were in a large campfire; the ring of firestones was quite visible.

  My head aching, my body echoing that ache and reeling from a strange vertigo, as if I were still in a plummeting Jeep, I attempted to assess the situation. I was outside, sitting on the ground, still dressed in the clothes I had worn during my suicide attempt, it was dark, and a large campfire crackled away six feet in front of me.

  “Shit,” I said aloud, my head and body aching as if I were hung over. Screwed up again. I got drunk and messed up. Only imagined driving into the pit. Fuck.

  “You didn’t screw up again,” came a soft, high voice from somewhere in the darkness behind me. “You really did drive into that mine shaft.”

  I started and tried to turn to see who had spoken, but I couldn’t move my head that far. I looked down and saw the ropes crossing my chest. I was tied to something—a stump, perhaps, or a boulder. I tried to remember if I had spoken those last thoughts aloud about getting drunk and screwing up. My head hurt abysmally.

  “It was an interesting way to try to kill yourself,” came the woman’s voice again. I was sure it was a woman. And something about the voice was hauntingly familiar.

  “Where are you?” I asked, hearing the raggedness in my voice. I swiveled my head as far as it would go but was rewarded with only a glimpse of movement in the shadows behind me. The woman was walking just outside the reach of firelight. I was sitting against a low boulder. Five strands of rope were looped around my chest and the rock. I could feel another rope restraining my wrists behind the boulder.

  “Don’t you want to ask who I am?” came the strangely familiar voice. “Get that out of the way?”

  For a second I said nothing, the voice and the slight mocking tone beneath the voice so familiar that I was sure that I would remember the owner of it before I had to ask. Someone who found me drunk in the woods and tied me up. Why tie me up? Maria might have done that if she had been around, but she was in Guatemala with her new husband. There were past lovers who disliked me enough to tie me up and leave me in the woods—or worse—but none of them had this voice. Of course, in the past year or two there had been so many strange women I’d awakened next to … and who said I had to know this person? Odds were that some crazy woman in the woods found me, observed that I was drunk and potentially violent—I tend to shout and recite poetry when I am at my drunkest—and tied me up. It all made sense—except for the fact that I didn’t remember getting drunk, that the aching head and body did not feel like my usual hangover, that it made no sense for even a crazy lady to tie me up, and that I did remember driving the fucking Jeep into the mine shaft.

  “Give up, Mr. Jakes?” came the voice.

  Mr. Jakes. That certain tone. A former student … I shook my head with the pain of trying to think. It was worse than a hangover headache, different, deeper.

  “You can call me Roland,” I said, my voice thick, squinting at the flames and trying to buy a moment to think.

  “No, I can’t, Mr. Jakes,” said Kelly Dahl, coming around into the light and crouching between me and the fire. “You’re Mr. Jakes. I can’t call you anything else. Besides, Roland is a stupid name.”

  I nodded. I had recognized her at once, even though it had been six or seven years since I had seen her last. When she had been a junior, she had worn her hair frosted blond and cut in a punk style just short of a mohawk. It was still short and cut raggedly, still a phony blond with dark roots, but no longer punk. Her eyes had been large and luminous as a child of eleven, even larger and lit with the dull light of drugs when she was seventeen, but now they were just large. The dark shadows under her eyes that had been a constant of her appearance in high school seemed gone, although that might be a trick of the firelight. Her body was not as angular and lean as I remembered from high school, no longer the bone-and-gristle gaunt, as if the coke or crack or whatever she’d been taking had been eating her up from the inside, but still thin enough that one might have to glance again to see the breasts before being certain it was a woman. This night she was wearing jeans and work boots with a loose flannel shirt over a dark sweatshirt and there was a red bandanna tied around her head. The firelight made the skin of her cheeks and forehead very pink. Her short hair stuck out over the bandana above her ears. She held a large camp knife loosely in her right hand as she squatted in front of me.

  “Hi, Kelly,” I said.

  “Hi, Mr. Jakes.”

  “Want to let me loose?”

  “No.”

  I hesitated. There had been none of the old bantering tone in her voice. We were just two adults talking, she in her early twenties, me fifty-something going on one hundred.

  “Did you tie me up, Kelly?”

  “Sure.”

  “Why?”

  “You’ll know in a few minutes, Mr. Jakes.”

  “Okay.” I tried to relax, settle back against the rock as if I were accustomed to driving my Jeep into a pit and waking up to find an old student threatening me with a knife. Is she threatening me with a knife? It was hard to tell. She held it casually, but if she wasn’t going to cut me loose, there was little reason for it to be there. Kelly had always been emotional, unusual, unstable. I wondered if she had gone completely insane.

  “Not completely nuts, Mr. Jakes. But close to it. Or so people thought … back when people were around.”

  I blinked. “Are you reading my mind, Kelly?”

  “Sure.”

  “How?” I asked. Perhaps I hadn’t died in the suicide attempt, but was even at that second lying comatose and brain-damaged and dreaming this nonsense in a hospital room somewhere. Or at the bottom of the pit.

  “Mu,” said Kelly Dahl.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Mu. Come on, don’t tell me you don’t remember.”

  I remembered. I had taught the juniors … no, it had been the sixth graders that year with Kelly … the Chinese phrase mu. On one level mu means only yes, but on a deeper level of Zen it was often used by the master when the acolyte asked a stupid, unanswerable or wrongheaded question such as “Does a dog have the Buddha-nature?” The Master would answer only, “Mu,” meaning—I say “yes” but mean “no,” but the actual answer is: Unask the question.

  “Okay,�
�� I said, “then tell me why I’m tied up.”

  “Mu,” said Kelly Dahl. She got to her feet and towered over me. Flames danced on the knife blade.

  I shrugged, although the tight ropes left that as something less than a graceful movement. “Fine,” I said. I was tired and scared and disoriented and angry. “Fuck it.” If you can read my mind, you goddamn neurotic, read this. I pictured a raised middle finger. And sit on it and swivel.

  Kelly Dahl laughed. I had heard her laugh very few times in sixth grade, not at all in eleventh grade, but this was the same memorable sound I had heard those few times—wild but not quite crazy, pleasant but with far too much edge to be called sweet.

  Now she crouched in front of me, the long knife blade pointed at my eyes. “Are you ready to start the game, Mr. Jakes?”

  “What game?” My mouth was very dry.

  “I’m going to be changing some things,” said Kelly Dahl. “You may not like all the changes. To stop me, you’ll have to find me and stop me.”

  I licked my lips. The knife had not wavered during her little speech. “What do you mean, stop you?”

  “Stop me. Kill me if you can. Stop me.”

  Oh, shit … the poor girl is crazy.

  “Maybe,” said Kelly Dahl. “But the game is going to be fun.” She leaned forward quickly and for a mad second I thought she was going to kiss me; instead she leveraged the flat of the blade under the ropes and tugged slightly. Buttons ripped. I felt the steel point cold against the base of my throat as the knife slid sideways.

  “Careful…”

  “Shh,” whispered Kelly Dahl, and she did kiss me, once, lightly, as her hand moved quickly from left to right and the ropes separated as if sliced by a scalpel.

  When she stepped back I jumped to my feet … tried to jump to my feet … my legs were asleep and I pitched forward, almost tumbling into the fire, catching myself clumsily with arms and hands that were as nerveless as the logs I could see lying in the flames.

  “Shit,” I said. “Goddamn it, Kelly, this isn’t very…” I had made it to my knees and turned toward her, away from the fire.

  I saw that the campfire was in a clearing on a ridgeline, somewhere I did not recognize but obviously nowhere near where I had driven into the mine shaft. There were a few boulders massed in the dark and I caught a glimpse of the Milky Way spilling above the pines. My Jeep was parked twenty feet away. I could see no damage but it was dark. A breeze had come up and the pine branches began swaying slightly, the needles rich in scent and sighing softly.

  Kelly Dahl was gone.

  * * *

  When I was training to be a teacher, just out of the army and not sure why I was becoming a teacher except for the fact that it was the furthest thing from humping a ruck through Vietnam that I could imagine, one of the trick questions the professors used to ask was—“Do you want to be the sage on the stage or the guide on the side?” The idea was that there were two kinds of teachers: the “sage” who walked around like a pitcher full of knowledge occasionally pouring some into the empty receptacle that was the student, or the “guide” who led the student to knowledge via furthering the young person’s own curiosity and exploration. The obvious right answer to that trick question was that the good teacher-to-be should be “the guide on the side,” not imposing his or her own knowledge, but aiding the child in self-discovery.

  I soon found out that the only way I could enjoy teaching was to be the sage on the stage. I poured knowledge and facts and insights and questions and doubts and everything else that I was carrying around directly from my overflowing pitcher to those twenty-five or so empty receptacles. It was most fun when I taught sixth grade because the receptacles hadn’t been filled with so much social moose piss and sheer misinformation.

  Luckily, there were a lot of things I was both acutely interested in, moderately knowledgeable about, and innocently eager to share with the kids: my passion for history and literature, my love of space travel and aviation, my college training in environmental science, a love of interesting architecture, my ability to draw and tell stories, a fascination with dinosaurs and geology, an enjoyment of writing, a high comfort level with computers, a hatred of war coupled with an obsession with things military, firsthand knowledge of quite a few remote places in the world, a desire to travel to see all of the world’s remote places, a good sense of direction, a warped sense of humor, a profound fascination with the lives of world historical figures such as Lincoln and Churchill and Hitler and Kennedy and Madonna, a flair for the dramatic, a love of music that would often lead to my sixth-grade class lying in the park across the street from the school on a warm spring or autumn day, sixty feet of school extension cord tapping my mini–stereo system into the electrical outlet near the park rest rooms, the sound of Vivaldi or Beethoven or Mozart or Rachmaninoff irritating the other teachers who later complained that they had to close their classroom windows so that their students would not be distracted.…

  I had enough passions to remain a sage on the stage for twenty-six years. Some of those years, said the inscription on a tombstone I once saw, were good.

  One of the incidents I remember with Kelly Dahl was from the week of environmental study the district had mandated for sixth-graders back when they had money to fund the field trips. Actually, we studied environmental science for weeks before the trip, but the students always remembered the actual three-day excursion to an old lodge along the Front Range of the Rockies. The district called those three days and two nights of hiking and doing experiments in the mountains the Environmental Awareness and Appreciation Unit. The kids and teachers called it Eco-Week.

  I remember the warm, late-September day when I had brought Kelly Dahl’s class to the mountains. The kids had found their bunks in the drafty old lodge, we had hiked our orientation hikes, and in the hour before lunch I had brought the class to a beaver pond a quarter of a mile or so from the lodge in order to do pH tests and to begin my stint as Science Sage. I pointed out the fireweed abounding around the disturbed pond edge—Epilobium angustifolium I taught them, never afraid to introduce a little Latin nomenclature into the mix—and had them find some of the fireweed’s cottony seeds along the bank or skimming across the still surface of the pond. I pointed out the aspen’s golden leaves and explained why they shimmered—how the upper surface of the leaf did not receive enough sunlight to photosynthesize, so the leaf was attached by a stem at an angle that allowed it to quake so that both sides received the light. I explained how aspens clone from the roots, so the expansive aspen grove we were looking at was—in a real sense—a single organism. I pointed out the late asters and wild chrysanthemums in their last days before the killing winter winds finished them for another season, and had the children hunt for the red leaves of cinquefoil and strawberry and geranium.

  It was at this point, when the kids were reconvened around me in an interested circle, pointing to the fallen red leaves and gall-swollen branches they had gathered, that Kelly Dahl asked, “Why do we have to learn all this stuff?”

  I remember sighing. “You mean the names of these plants?”

  “Yes.”

  “A name is an instrument of teaching,” I said, quoting the Aristotle maxim I had used many times with this class, “and of discerning natures.”

  Kelly Dahl had nodded slightly and looked directly at me, the startling, unique quality of her green eyes in sharp contrast to the sad commonness of her cheap Kmart jacket and corduroys. “But you can’t learn it all,” she had said, her voice so soft that the other kids had leaned forward to hear it above the gentle breeze that had come up. It was one of those rare times when an entire class was focused on what was being said.

  “You can’t learn it all,” I had agreed, “but one can enjoy nature more if you learn some of it.”

  Kelly Dahl had shaken her head, almost impatiently I’d thought at the time. “You don’t understand,” she said. “If you don’t understand it all, you can’t understand any of it. Nature is … ev
erything. It’s all mixed up. Even we’re part of it, changing it by being here, changing it by trying to understand it.…” She had stopped then and I only stared. It certainly had been the most I had heard this child say in one speech in the three weeks of class we had shared so far. And what she said was absolutely accurate, but—I felt—largely irrelevant.

  While I paused to frame a reply that all of the kids could understand, Kelly had gone on. “What I mean is,” she said, obviously more impatient with her own inability to explain than with my inability to understand, “that learning a little of this stuff is like tearing up that painting you were talking about on Tuesday … the woman…”

  “The Mona Lisa,” I said.

  “Yeah. It’s like tearing up the Mona Lisa into little bits and handing around the bits so everyone would enjoy and understand the painting.” She stopped again, frowning slightly, although whether at the metaphor or at speaking up at all, I did not know.

  For a minute there was just the silence of the aspen grove and the beaver pond. I admit that I was stumped. Finally, I said, “What would you suggest we do instead, Kelly?”

  At first I thought that she would not answer, so withdrawn into herself did she seem. But eventually she said softly, “Close our eyes.”

  “What?” I said, not quite hearing.

  “Close our eyes,” repeated Kelly Dahl. “If we’re going to look at this stuff, we might as well look with something other than big words.”

  We all closed our eyes without further comment, the class of normally unruly sixth graders and myself. I remember to this day the richness of the next few minutes: the butterscotch-and-turpentine tang of sap from the ponderosa pine trees up the hill from us, the vaguely pineapple scent of wild chamomile, the dry-leaf dusty sweetness of the aspen grove beyond the pond, the equally sweet decayed aroma of meadow mushrooms such as Lactarius and Russula, the pungent seaweed smell of pond scum and the underlying aromatic texture of the sun-warmed earth and the heated pine needles beneath our legs. I remember the warmth of the sun on my face and hands and denim-covered legs that long-ago September afternoon. I recall the sounds from those few minutes as vividly as I can call back anything I have ever heard: the soft lapping of water trickling over the sticks-and-mud beaver dam, the rustle of dry clematis vines and the brittle stirring of tall gentian stalks in the breeze, the distant hammering of a woodpecker in the woods toward Mt. Meeker and then, so suddenly that my breath caught, the startling crash of wings as a flight of Canada geese came in low over the pond and, without a single honk, veered south toward the highway and the larger ponds there. I think that none of us opened our eyes then, even when the geese flew low over us, so that the magic spell would not be broken. It was a new world, and Kelly Dahl was—somehow, inexplicably, unarguably—our guide.