“Yeah, yeah,” Kurt said as they left the room.
Gail turned and glared Buddy and Kurt out of the room, but not before the man lying beside her began his tortured wretched sobs. A man shouldn’t be reduced to tears in public. There were some hells no man can stand, though, and he couldn’t stop himself. All the misery came out in breathless, aching gasps, and they kept coming. She metasensed Kurt barking at Buddy in near silent whispers. He thought people should obey Gail without thinking, which as always brought a worried frown to Gail’s face. Working with people like Kurt, she would be able to enslave her own household with ease. Even thinking about such things made her ill.
Gail turned back to the man in her arms. From experience, she knew to bump up his juice the rest of the way slowly, although she found it was difficult to keep from setting him at his optimum in an instant. She didn’t want to knock the poor man out.
After several long moments, the wretched sobbing faded away. The man smiled at her through his tears.
“You’re a gift from God,” he said.
Two hours later, she and Kurt and Buddy and the man were in the car traveling back to Detroit. The man’s wife and five kids would follow shortly after they packed.
The man was the Reverend Matthew Robert Narbanor, a minister in the Methodist Church. Gail was appalled. She already had more than enough problems, and now a curse from the heavens thrust a damned minister in her household. The last thing she needed was yet another person who thought they should have a say in what she did and how she behaved. Thinking about him made her gut ache, as if she was a child again in her parent’s household, struggling under blankets of constant disapproval.
What had she done to deserve this, anyway?
What’s more, he couldn’t keep his church in Lansing while living with her in Detroit. He had lost his job, and wouldn’t be bringing in any money to the household. Worse, he had a wife and five kids and Gail had no idea where they would stay in her already overcrowded household. She dreaded their reaction when they saw her household’s third world shantytown, and she dreaded even more the disapproving lecture she predicted would come when he found out she lived in sin with Van.
Why couldn’t things be easier than this? Everything would be so much easier if she had people in her household she liked. As it was, even old friends like Sylvie and Kurt had pulled away and left her alone. The only support she had left was Van, and she didn’t want to think about how she would react if he left.
Or, being realistic, given the rest of her problems, when.
(13)
“Hey, don’t worry about it,” Van said. “It’s not like you have to pay any attention to what he thinks.”
“Yah, uh huh, right,” Gail said. “Everything’s out of control. I don’t want someone else trying to tell me what to do, even if I can ignore him. I mean, everyone in the entire household wants to tell me how to handle the juice, and they want to tell me how I should act, and what I should do, and how I should feel. I don’t need some minister giving it to me, too. I mean, those guys are professionals.”
They stood in their plywood-roofed tent, stuffy with the afternoon heat, Van’s head bumping the ceiling. Gail had found Van right after he had come back from the Michigan humanities department library where he had been working on his dissertation, and dragged him into the tent for privacy.
Not that the near see-through tent walls provided much of that.
“Don’t think about it. Worrying won’t make things any better. Think about something positive,” he said in his gentle voice as he reached for her and pulled her to him.
Gail enjoyed having Van hold her and rub her back. She laid her head on his shoulder and relaxed, knowing that at least one person loved her.
“Uh huh. It’s just so hard. Everyone here has something they think I should be doing differently. No matter what I do, everyone always disapproves. I can’t fix things. I’m trying to do things right, but things keep getting worse. I give everyone lots of space. I put a lot of work into not using my tricks on people. I’m practically their slave and they still hate me!”
The tears came, and she held tight to Van as she cried.
“I don’t mean to be yanking around people’s juice, I just can’t help it. I’m trying to move the juice the right way. I’m trying as hard as I can.”
“Shh, shh, I know you are,” Van said, holding her close. “You’re doing fine. Give it a little more time.”
Gail didn’t answer, and clung tighter to Van as her tears dampened his shoulder. After a long time, her tears faded away.
“I love you, did you know that?”
“Mmm-hmm,” Van said. He kept rubbing, and slowly his hands wandered to other places, stroking and gently rubbing. After long moments, he slipped his hands under her shirt and stroked along her sides and back.
Gail pulled away.
At her response, Van also pulled away, and a several foot gap now yawned between them. He didn’t say anything at all, staring at her.
“I’m sorry. I’m, uh, not in the mood right now.” Gail shivered with the loss of his touch.
“You haven’t been in the mood for weeks,” he said. His voice was gentle, but there was a hard edge to it.
“I’m sorry. I’m really sorry.” Her tears welled up in her eyes again.
“You’re not in the mood,” Van said. He usually took rejection moderately well, but she noticed an angry edge to his frown this time.
“I’m sorry. It’s, well, been a bad day. I’ll probably be more in the mood tomorrow.” Gail glanced down as she lied, and had a hard time making her words sound convincing.
“Tomorrow,” Van said, cold. “It’s been ‘tomorrow’ for the last six weeks.”
“I’m sorry. I really am. I just haven’t been in the mood.” Tears gathered in the corners of her eyes again, and she wasn’t sure whether her emotions came because of Van, for pushing her, or because of her fears.
“Listen to yourself. You haven’t been in the mood for anything for weeks. I’ve been doing what you want, I give you support, I give you room. When does it get to be my turn?” Van stood tall in the center of the tent, the angled ceiling pressing his brown hair almost into a point.
Gail glanced up at Van’s angry face and realized this wasn’t some sudden anger. Van didn’t do ‘sudden’. This was something he had been thinking about for days, waiting for the right time. He was serious, and possibly angry enough to leave her.
Her anger leached away and left Gail only with the fear. She couldn’t cope without Van. Against the awfulness of her life, he was her only remaining support.
“I’m sorry. Please, I’m sorry,” she said, the tears finally coming again.
“Yes, you’re sorry. You’ve said that before, too. It doesn’t seem to make any difference. You keep doing what you’ve been doing, and apologize some more. Why don’t you try thinking about someone other than yourself for a change? When’s the last time you thought about me? I used to have a career path before you transformed. Now, I’m going to be stuck in Detroit with a history PhD. There are people who’ll hire a history PhD, but they aren’t in Detroit. What about that? Have you ever thought about that?” Van stood up taller in his anger, and his head rattled the plywood.
Gail found herself taking another step back, until her calves butted into the cot behind her. More mud oozed through the cracks in the floor, as Gail’s weight shifted the plywood sheets. She tried to come up with something to say besides more apologies.
“What do you want me to do?” she said. Was this ‘it’? She had feared this moment ever since she realized she would never be interested in sex again because of her low juice problems. The fear of losing Van gnawed at her heart. Rationally, he shouldn’t stay. She would never bear his children. She couldn’t provide sex. Her moods swung from bad to worse.
She always thought her irrational fears were the worst, but a rational fear you couldn’t do anything about…
“I don’t know.” Van waved his h
ands into the tent ceiling. “Anything. Except whine. And sulk.”
Gail took a deep breath. “I can try,” she said.
Van grunted, not satisfied.
“What about your career? What do you want to do about that?”
Van thought for a long time, shrugged, and relaxed a little. “I’m stumped. I haven’t managed to come up with any viable ideas.”
Gail nodded. “I’ll support you. Whatever we come up with.”
Van nodded, and relaxed a little further.
“So would it help if I tried to be more positive?” Gail said, making a decision, one she couldn’t believe she made. “And concentrate on you more? I really do apologize, even though I know you don’t want to listen to another apology, but I’ll try to do better. Would that help?”
“Yeah,” Van said. “I think it would.”
Gail smiled a suggestive smile. “You know, I’m not really interested now, but maybe with a little time and effort…”
Van actually smiled then, and opened his arms, and Gail flowed back into his warm embrace.
The Rickenbach Temper
(14)
Gail lay in her cot and wished the cool of the evening would penetrate into the stifling interior of the tent. Van had gone hours ago and Gail had gone herself to get dinner, but she came back to the tent after she finished. She couldn’t think of anywhere else to go.
She had never faked an orgasm with Van before. She wondered if Van knew. It would be like Van not to say anything. Buried in the back of one of the brochures on being a Focus had been an ominous statement that still haunted her, long after she lost the brochure. “One of the side effects of being a Transform with low juice is low libido. The Focus should correct this whenever necessary.” Back while stuck in the Clinic Van had figured out that Gail’s light sensitivity and short temper were due to low juice, a side effect of not having enough Transforms in her household. If he had seen the statement about low libido, he hadn’t commented on it.
Gail’s household approached full size and her personal juice remained low. She would have low juice problems for the rest of her life. She would never be interested in sex again. When she figured this out, she had cried for hours. Gail had been searching for a way to tell Van in some polite fashion, but she had failed. What man wouldn’t think of leaving a frigid woman? Now this. Telling Van now became much harder, if not impossible.
Outside, people began to exit their tents and head up to the house. Tuesday night, time for the household’s sixth weekly meeting, the ones Bart had started after he took over as household leader. She had never been to one.
Not having to worry about accidentally enslaving her household had started out as a blessed relief, but recently she had developed a little problem – her hearing had improved and now she heard every word said in the meetings. With her metasense allowing her to view the meetings as they happened, she might as well be there.
She hated it. Before her hearing improved, she had not only been cut out of the household decision making process, she no longer knew the issues. Now, better informed, she realized her people spent more time bitching about her than even Van, in his disgust, had said.
By the time the sun set, they were gathered and bitching again. Bart, still the household leader, always allocated the beginning of the meeting for people to bring up problems, and whatever problems they started with, they always wound around to complaining about Gail. How she interfered, how she mismanaged the juice supply, how she was the ultimate source of problems she didn’t even know existed. They even blamed her for the household’s residence out in a field.
She was, however, damned tired of listening to people sniping at her behind her back. Passively enslaved was one thing, demeaning slavery another. She did her best and nobody gave a damn. Everything was always her fault.
Screw this, she decided. She didn’t understand what had triggered her decision, the annoyance of having to cope with the goddamned minister the Clinic forced on her, or stooping to fake an orgasm, or the new thought creeping into the edges of her mind that she would be better off totally alone, without Van, but she was over the edge.
If her Transforms had wanted an easily enslaved Focus, they had chosen the wrong one. She hoped she could keep at least some control over her temper.
She put her filthy feet back into the muddy sneakers and marched up to the house. She was surprised she had lasted this long. If anything, she missed the head-butting in her life – she had always butted heads with her father, and at U of M, made friends with people not afraid to butt heads with her, or run away disgusted when a bit of her Rickenbach temper slipped out.
The silence when she entered the cramped living room was deafening.
Eighteen of her nineteen Transforms had gathered in the room, and eleven other adults, sitting on chairs and on the floor and stuffed in corners. Van had curled his long body into the far corner, buried behind rows of other people. Sylvie and Kurt sat next to each other on the floor with their backs to the couch. No children or adolescents attended. Bart’s orders.
Bart stood on the hearth, presiding, with Virgil Conte and John Bracken beside him. Bart was about forty-five, with sandy blond hair and blue eyes, a big beefy man who worked as a shift super at GM’s Clark Street Assembly. He frowned at her when she entered the room, as did Virgil Conte, the household’s treasurer, and John Bracken, in charge of household maintenance.
“Gail,” Bart said, unwelcoming. “Is there anything we can help you with, before we get back to our meeting?”
“Oh, don’t mind me,” Gail said, cheerful for the first time in weeks. “I just decided to join you tonight.”
Bart turned to his wife, Isabella, checking to make sure that Gail hadn’t clipped her. Gail, in a good mood, hadn’t. Bart worried his lower lip, knowing that if he made Gail angry, he would be hurting his own wife. Gail took a moment to glance around at the faces around her, pleasantly surprised to find they weren’t all as hostile as she had feared. Many of them didn’t appear unhappy, and Melanie and Betha Ebener looked positively pleased to see her. Melanie even stood up.
“Take my seat, Gail,” Melanie said. Today her plain pastel blue dress was accented by a white scalloped collar and costume jewelry beads. Gail didn’t think she had ever seen Melanie wear jewelry before.
Gail almost said no, but then she figured, what the hell. She was tired of spending so much effort to be considerate of everyone else at her own expense.
“Thank you.” She nodded to Melanie as she sat, and Melanie beamed.
“Brown-noser,” she heard Ed Zarzemski’s wife, Phyllis murmur. Gail noticed that she had pumped Melanie just a bit in her pleasure at the friendliness. She hurriedly fixed the inadvertent juice addition.
The room settled down, but Bart didn’t speak. Gail studied him out of the corner of her eyes and noted the angry set of his jaw. Probably at a loss, thinking of a way to get rid of her without getting Isabella hurt. Gail knew she should feel guilty for the blatant manipulation, but she didn’t. Not right now.
“Don’t you have some meeting business to conduct?” she said. “Isn’t this the time for people to bring up problems?”
She smiled sweetly, wondering if anyone would have the nerve to snipe about her handling of the juice to her face. She was half-ready to jump down the throat of anyone who dared to complain about her, and give them all a taste of a real Rickenbach temper tantrum. She had no idea what the juice would do if she let loose.
No one brought up any problems, about her or anything else. Bart took a relieved breath and acquiesced to her will. “Yes, well. I think we’re done dealing with all the problems. Why don’t we go on to the Treasurer’s Report? Virgil?”
Bart stepped down from the hearth, and Virgil stepped up. Virgil was Tricia Bluen’s live-in boyfriend, a thirtyish man of medium height, with medium brown hair and a little bit of a paunch. He wore a business suit, the very picture of an accountant.
“Well, um,” he said, reading from a paper,
“balance last week was $42,697.22. Income was $3,241.65. Expenses were $3,066.89, giving a net gain of $174.76. The new balance is $42,871.98.”
The large numbers reassured Gail. Many of the household had contributed from their life savings, so the household would be able to afford some kind of real housing before winter. Gail hoped the money would suffice. At only $174 in a week, they weren’t gaining ground quickly.
There was a long pause, and then Gail realized that everyone waited for her response to those numbers. She was startled when she noticed it, and then nodded.
Everyone had waited on her, including a now-irritated-with-himself Bart. “Thank you, Virgil,” he said, taking control again and stepping up, onto the hearth. “The next item on the agenda is the septic system. We have a lot of people living here, and as you know, the septic system isn’t built to handle it. We’ve come up with some steps to improve…”
The meeting went on for another hour and Gail stayed through all of it. When she left, she doubted anyone liked her any better. Except for one person. Herself.
---
Her overflowing annoyance at the world also included the damned metasense ghost. The ghost now showed every Thursday morning, stayed for hours, and every time she tried to communicate, the ghost ran away. Several times the ghost had pantomimed something, and when it did she could almost metasense a shape, a human shape, and always at the same location. Annoying.
This time she would see. She worked it out in her mind, how to move slowly and carefully, keeping her body mostly the same shape she kept it when she slept.
She started the move when the ghost showed, at 2 a.m. Moving about an inch a minute, she crept off the cot and down to the floor. By the time she reached the tent opening, the ghost had progressed to its third stop. If the ghost followed the normal pattern, it should be in position for her to see at its next stop, about fifty feet away.
No Chains Shall Bind Me (The Good Doctor's Tales Folio Seven) Page 10
