Dancing with Eternity

by John Patrick Lowrie

  “I’m awfully sorry,” he said.

  “We were—It was an upsetting visit. They—I hope we didn’t—I mean Alice ...”

  “Alice Cheatham.”

  “She just wanted to see her fath— her fa— her fa-family. She just ... she just wanted to ...”

  “I wouldn’t blame yourselves for this. Old man Cheatham has been crazy for years, ever since that bad business. I guess we all expected something like this to happen someday. I’m just sorry it had to happen when you folks were here.”

  I couldn’t say anything. I just stared. Stared at the past. But the sheriff had something else on his mind:

  “You and your family weren’t planning on staying here, were you? In Nazareth?”

  I looked up at him. “No. No, we were going to leave tomorrow morning.”

  “I think that would be best,” he said.

  Chapter 26

  I don’t know how I made it back up the stairs. My legs felt useless; my soul was in free fall. I felt complicit. I felt used. I felt stained, assaulted, ashamed, outraged. How many, I thought? How many human beings would cease to be before we were done? Drake: incinerated. Jacob: lost in Switzerland. Now John and Louise. Dead. Dead. The word kept ringing in my head like a church bell. What disease were we spreading in our quest to cure Alice? What had set this lethal juggernaut in motion? With each step I mounted I became more resolved: I would not go another hour, another step, I would not perform one more dance for Steel without knowing.

  I can’t say what I looked like when I let myself into our room but Steel recoiled from me before I spoke. “What’s—What—,” she started. She gathered her robe around her, kneeling on the bed.

  I tried to still the hurricane howling in my head as I closed the door and leaned against it. With my eyes dark and my jaw clenched I asked her one of the first questions I’d ever asked her, one of the first she hadn’t answered. I asked, “What is your name?”

  She pulled her robe tighter. “What? What do you mean? What happened?”

  I tamped down my anger but I didn’t know how long I could restrain it. “You have to tell me what your name is. Now.” My head felt like a nest of spiders—little strands of thought running in every direction but none of them making any sense. They couldn’t make any sense. It wasn’t possible. Where did she get the eggs?

  Steel hadn’t lost her touch; she looked genuinely confused, innocent, as she responded. “You know my— What are you talking about? My name? Tell me what happened.” She started to stand. I took a step toward her and she stopped, paled, collapsed back on the bed—ceding the room to me, searching my face, my eyes.

  “No,” I shook my head. “No. You answer my question. You answer my FREAKING question.”

  I could see it now. Fear haunted her, but not fear of me. “Mo, please, tell me what’s wrong!” She reached out to me— her long, tapered fingers caressed the air, offering, seducing.

  Crossing to her took no time. She huddled against the headboard as I loomed over her, balancing. Fear I saw, yes, and profound sadness, but still that iron determination. I think my determination finally matched hers. I knew the consequences of what I was about to say, but I meant every word: “You will tell me what your name is or I swear to you that I will go back downstairs and tell the sheriff everything I know about you.”

  That shocked her into action. She grasped my wrist with one hand, reached to stroke my cheek with the other, her eyes imploring, “Mo, Mo, my hero, my—my friend and protector! What has hurt you? Tell me—”

  “STOP IT!” I hissed. She took her hands away as though the touch of my skin had burned her. Sitting on her feet, hands in her lap, she was neutral, attentive, unthreatening, but unyielding. Never yielding. “All right,” I breathed, “if you won’t tell me, I’ll tell you.” She waited, just waited: her eyes clear, an artery pulsing in her slender throat. Would she answer me? Would I be able to believe her if she did? I had no other option; she was my only source of information. In a voice that was probably too harsh I asked her, “Your name is Estelle, isn’t it?”

  I could see her react to the sound of that name: a small withdrawal of her head, a tension in her shoulders. I thought she was going to deny it but she just stared up at me, unable to respond, unable to move. Fear now overwhelmed her, paralyzing her. I didn’t want to threaten her; I didn’t want ... I had to get her to talk to me. Trying to calm down I sat beside her and took her hand in mine. Quietly, gently I repeated, “Isn’t it?”

  “What—” tears stopped her voice. “I don’t—People ... some people ... I’ve, I’ve ... yes, I’ve been called that—”

  “By whom?” My anger was being replaced by fear. Terror not of the plague or death or anything the future held, but of what I might already have done, or abetted. “By whom?” I urged her, coaxed her, demanded that she tell me the truth at long last.

  She was trembling now. Tears shook off the ends of her beautiful lashes. “Mo, I—I—” Her voice broke. “Oh my god, what has happened? What could have— Why are you—”

  I put my arm around her shoulders, pulled her to me and held her hand, smelled her hair as I placed my lips by her ear. “You have to tell me. Everything. Now. I have news and I’m afraid it’s not good news and I will give it to you. But first, you have to tell me who I’m giving it to. I have to know who you are, what you are.”

  The trembling got worse. I stroked her arm as she tried to speak, “I—I—I don’t ... know what, know what you want ... I—Please, Mo, just tell me—”

  I placed my hands on her shoulders and turned her to me. She was smaller than I had ever seen her. Trapped, alone, she quailed before me, her chin quivering, her eyes liquid, lost. “All right,” I said, “All right. It’s all right. I’ll tell you what I think; you tell me if I’m wrong. Okay?”

  She nodded. And waited. Once I said this it couldn’t be unsaid. Once I knew it, it couldn’t be unknown. But I had to know. I had to. “You’re ... you’re Alice’s m-mo-moth—” I hated that word. It tasted like cardboard, like ... nothing. The very idea that Steel could be Alice’s ... Alice’s ... It was just so bizarre, so unthinkable. I changed tacks, “Alice is ... is your daughter, isn’t she?”

  There it was. The question had been uttered. Steel, Estelle, sat before me motionless, not denying it. The next incredulous question followed inevitably: “You married John Cheatham?” Once again, she didn’t deny it. She looked at me, looked for condemnation, recrimination. I was too stunned to offer either. All I had was, “W-why? How?”

  She trembled in my grasp, tears running down her cheeks. Tears of shame? Of loss? Of relief? I couldn’t tell. She pulled away from me. “Okay,” she sniffed, that thick curtain of poise trying to descend again, hiding her. She wiped her face with the back of her hand, straightened her robe, “Now you know. Now ... now tell me what’s happened. Please.”

  “Now I—? What do I know? I don’t know anything!” I kept falling into rage and I didn’t want to. “How could you—Why did you— What the hell were you thinking? Why? Why did you marry him? Do you know what you’ve done to him? Do you understand what effect you’ve had on this poor ... this innocent, this—this child, this mortal infant?”

  “I— I know ... Mo, please—”

  “I don’t think you do! I don’t think you have any idea what you’ve ... How could you be so ... so—”

  “Mo, please! Listen to me. You don’t understand. I don’t know what you’re thinking, but you have to believe me. You weren’t there. You don’t understand!”

  I squeezed my skull between my palms, pressed my eyeballs into their sockets with the heels of my hands. “Well, then I guess you better explain it to me,” I said. The ground wasn’t under me. I had no compass. “What was it, some part of the experiment?” I asked, “Some part of Archie’s project?”

  “No! No, it— It was—” she looked for words, but I couldn’t imagine what words she’d find.

  Angrily I turned on her, “That’s it, isn’t it? Archie wanted t
o know what it was like to be married, didn’t she? See what it was like from the inside? Get the straight dope? Record it in her report?” A waterfall of anger poured over me. “GODDAMN IT! I was married! You can’t— You can’t ... HOLY SHIVA!” Everything that I had kept protected within myself for the twelve centuries since I’d lost my wife was being attacked, soiled, demeaned.

  “Mo, Mo, please. Calm down. Lower your voice. You can’t talk— You can’t talk that way here. Please.”

  My elbows on my knees, my head in my hands, I seethed, I reeled. I lowered my voice, “God ... DAMN it. Goddamn it. Who are you people? What the hell do you think—Goddamn it.” I was lost. I didn’t know how I’d find my way back.

  Steel spoke quietly, hesitantly. She kept her hands in her lap, “We, we didn’t—Don’t blame Archie, please, Mo. She didn’t want us to ... I mean, she wanted us to interact with the Edenites, to, to join their culture, be part of them so we could, could understand them as best we could. She didn’t want to judge them from the outside. She wanted to characterize them by their own standards, not by ours—”

  “Yeah, yeah, all right. I get it. She wanted to get close. So what did you do? Join a dating service?”

  “A what?”

  Another archaic concept. When was the last time anyone went on a date? Except on Eden. “Never mind. Go on.”

  “Please listen, Mo. Please.” She risked touching my shoulder. I didn’t pull away. Where would I go if I did?

  “I’m listening.”

  “Try not to—” she gathered herself, “Okay. Okay. I met—we ... met, John and I, I mean. I met John at a ... a church social.”

  “Oh, Shiva,” I couldn’t help laughing.

  “Mo, please.” She looked to the door. “We’re supposed to be Methodists. You can’t use that kind of language—”

  “Sorry.” I shook my head in utter bewildered despair. “Sorry. You met at a church social.”

  Steel examined me closely before continuing, “Archie and Drake were posing as a married couple. I ... I was supposed to be Archie’s spinster cousin from New Jerusalem.” She didn’t go on.

  “Okay,” I prompted. The language of this strange place was almost too much to handle: spinster cousin. Allah and Buddha and fricking Mohammed on a crutch.

  “It was, it would have been strange if we hadn’t ... hadn’t gone to these—It’s what they do here. We were here, in this place, this culture. We were new in town. People assumed we’d go ... invited us. Thought we could ... meet people, get to know—” I could see the whole thing in vivid detail in my mind. A room full of Edenites dressed in their Sunday best, plain, sunburned, battered, worn ... and Steel: exquisite, almond-eyed Steel. I tried to keep listening to her, but it was hard. “When we got there a woman introduced John to me. It was like ... it was like her job to make sure everyone met someone. John ... offered to get me some punch. He, he asked me to dance. We—”

  I couldn’t believe she was telling me this—this freaking high school romance. “What are you trying to tell me? What are you saying? Okay, you met, you danced, what freaking difference does it make?”

  “I’m—I’m trying to explain—”

  “Explain what? How you seduced him? How you lured this, this child—”

  “He wasn’t a child. He was almost thirty years old!”

  “Oh, excuse me. This mature being of almost three whole decades—”

  “And I didn’t seduce him! I didn’t do anything to encourage him, I was just ... polite. Friendly.” And spectacular, I thought. She went on, “You have to remember: no one has sex here. I mean, almost never. They, they only have sex when they’re married, when they’re alone, when no one can see them. Archie and Drake and I weren’t having sex. We hadn’t had sex since we’d gotten down to the surface. I suppose Archie and Drake could have but they weren’t. We wanted to experience the tension these people deal with.”

  I couldn’t believe this. “So you were randy? Is that what you’re saying?”

  “No, no! I mean, I was, but that’s not—I mean— Everyone here is randy to some extent or other all the time. That’s one of the things we wanted to research. How they dealt with it, how it affected them—”

  I shook my head in amazement, “What chance do you think he had against you? I mean look at you! You have an entire—” I couldn’t talk about that here. I couldn’t speak of the interstellar cosmetic medical system that made her what she was.

  Her response was defensive, desperate, “You’re not listening! It was me, not him. I didn’t have a chance. I fell in love with him. When he asked me to marry him—”

  “What are you talking about?” This strained my credulity beyond the tatters it was already in.

  She was crying again. “We didn’t know, we didn’t know. We were so ... naïve. We’d never—” She turned to me. “You lived in a culture like this. You spent centuries around married people, around children. We—Archie and Drake and I—we’d never met anyone who was married, never knew anything like it. It was totally alien to us.” She pushed her hair back from her face. “Don’t you see? The Edenites don’t know each other. They’ve never melded; they’ve never experienced any point of view but their own. Each one of them is separate, disparate. They’re utterly, totally, achingly alone. When they marry, when they approach each other in any way at all, they have to do it on faith. They have to trust that the other won’t hurt them, rob them, murder them, rape them.”

  I knew all this, but I didn’t know where she was going with it. She thought for a moment. “They ... they have a phrase here, a—a concept; I don’t know if you’ve heard it since you’ve been here, but they say it a lot. They call it breaking someone’s heart. They say things like, ‘He broke my heart,’ or ‘Please don’t break my heart.’ They sing songs about it. It seems like all of their songs are either about religion or breaking someone’s heart. We didn’t know what it meant.”

  “I know what it means,” I said, my voice ashen and dry.

  “Do you? I thought you might.” She sensed my grief and put her hand on my arm. “I thought you might. How could I break his heart? How could I break mine?” She turned to me with new conviction, “And anyway I know you understand. I know you do. I’ve seen how you look at Alice.”

  “Alice?”

  “These people ... these people are dying. All of them. John, even when he was dancing with me that first time, was dying. He was facing his own death. When he asked me to marry him, how could I turn him down?”

  “So you married him out of pity?”

  “No! No. Think for a minute. Do you pity Alice? You don’t. You love her. You admire her. You admire her for what she has to face every instant that she’s alive. You respect her for the courage she has to have just to do the things that we take for granted. What if Alice came to you and told you she wanted to spend her life with you, her whole life, with you and no one else? What if she told you that she loved you and you knew it was true? What if she asked you to marry her?”

  This didn’t seem fair, somehow, but I sure didn’t have an answer for it. “I—I—” was as far as I got.

  “How would you turn her down? You tell me. How? I had never experienced anything like it. John was offering his entire being. To me. As a token of love. If Alice offered that to you would you marry her out of pity?”

  New emotions were flooding me now, or maybe very, very old ones, so quickly I couldn’t identify them: love, grief, longing, fear. Could I afford to lose anyone else? Could I lose Alice and still ... still be ... be anything at all? “Alice,” I finally said, “I— I don’t—”

  Steel drove on, “He was offering me an honor, an honor greater than any I’d ever known. What gift could I give him that would be great enough to honor his gift to me?”

  I looked into Steel’s eyes. What I saw there was suddenly, warmly familiar to me—ancient, but familiar. I saw in her eyes what my wife must have seen in mine on our wedding day: that my eyes no longer belonged to me. They weren’t mine any
more. They were hers. They belonged to her. And now so much of what I had never understood about Steel finally fell into place. Why I had never been able to read her. I hadn’t known. I could never read her eyes because I hadn’t suspected in my wildest, most improbable fancies that she had given them away as I had given mine. She had given them to John Cheatham, to her ... to her husband. Her eyes, her heart ... everything.

  But her question about Alice wasn’t fair, and I’d finally figured out how. “Did you tell him?” I asked.

  “What?”

  “Did you tell John Cheatham who you were? Where you were from? How long you’d lived, how long you expected to live?”

  “Mo, listen—”

  “Did you tell him that he was going to spend his whole life with you but you were only going to spend the tiniest fraction of yours with him?”

  “Mo, I—” she looked at me for a moment and then collapsed, crushed under inescapable culpability. When she spoke again it was in the thinnest whisper. “No. I— I couldn’t, we were ... under cover. We couldn’t—”

  “Yes. Yes, I understand the stringent demands of field anthropology.” What was I going to do? How could I deal with this and still keep my ... keep my ... If only, I thought for the first time in a long time, if only I hadn’t re-booted early. If only I’d been stronger, truer. I would still be married. I would still have my wife with me. She would know what to do with this, how to help, how to make things ... better.

  No, that was wrong. If I hadn’t re-booted early I would have died about the same time she did. But I might be with her now. The vision of her that I had in the schoolyard hit me again with physical force.

  Steel took my hand in both of hers and brought it to her cheek. “Please, Mo. Please try to understand. I gave him everything I could, everything I had to give. I loved him. He was going to die. I didn’t know what else to do.”

  I tried to put it all together. She, Archie and Drake had come to this place to study it. When they got here they were profoundly affected, as I had been, by the children, the families, the courage in the face of death. They had joined the culture, become part of it—got jobs, maybe, a place to live, made friends, acquaintances. Steel was introduced to John Cheatham and, to her complete surprise, fell in love with him. They married; she bore Jacob, then Alice. When it came down to staying with her husband or saving the lives of her children, maternal instinct—which Steel couldn’t have been aware she had or even identified—took her over, and she elected to save her children, to take them with her back to Earth. Maybe she wanted to take John with her, too, I didn’t know.