Her M.D. gives her the power to override tics in the system. She knows how far she can push the limits and which procedures are too expensive, will tip the balance and get her censured.
The kidney treatment is out of bounds. Ellie hesitates, approves it. “You’ll feel better soon.”
Tears in the patient’s eyes. “I thought—”
“New protocol.”
Boutique doctors practice as they see fit because the rich bypass the corporate algorithm. As she leaves the patient, she can’t help checking Forever’s offer, the one Don Stapleton keeps pushing. Staggeringly huge. She couldn’t possibly provide services worth that. The C’s would devour her. And she would be treating them … forever. The same people. Her emergency skills would atrophy. A trap.
But one more override and she might be out on her ass. She knows that her recklessness is because of her infusion. She just needs to make it to the end of her shift. After an hour she gets Billings’s results. “Fractured ulna. This bone,” she tells him, touching it. “I’m ordering a mending infusion.”
“Hear that?” Billings yells. The cop is startled awake.
Ellie asks Billings, “How would you like to stay out of bar fights and feel better?”
“Can’t afford it.”
“I only need your consent. You’ll get neuroplasticity meds and counseling. You have to promise me you’ll go to counseling or it won’t work.”
“You sure, Doc? I mean—”
“I’m sure.”
Billings reminds her of her father—at the mercy of the unfeeling algorithm. He’d had choices, though, more choices than Billings.
She has always avoided thoughts about the tangle of their lives. Except, she thinks, surprising herself, they come out through my fingers. Hours and hours and hours at night. They come out when I improvise, play jazz. They’re not as far away as I think.
Filled with momentary wonder, she draws back the curtain, where the eternal next patient sits. Everything seems so preternaturally sharp, so full of potential for too much thought that she aches for her shift to end.
* * *
ON THE RED-EYE, Ellie stares out the window of the plane at a solid unending glare of light all the way down the East Coast, imagining all those people, and does not go fetal. She does not scream.
She has not called her father.
As she steps from the cab at Sunnyland, she feels as relaxed as if she had run 10 miles on a treadmill. High-rises surround her, receding grids of light blocking any other view. Twenty thousand elderly live here on 30 acres, a template reproduced nationally. Those living here did not watch their pennies. They cannot catch the wave of technology for a long-term ride.
Ellie will always have a job. The life she worked for is bright and assured, an enviable personal future. A future where she will hide from time, emotion, and change.
Irked at her thoughts, she grabs her bag and enters the lobby of her father’s building. On the hospice floor, visitors nap in chairs, maintaining vigil. Outside her father’s room, a whiff of whiskey as she passes two chatting, weathered men in fishing caps. Inside, strings of colored lights, low revelry, and Coltrane’s sax wailing for the second time in 24 hours, this time no dream. Her fingers flex in a near-unconscious riff. She spots her father in a reclining chair.
His face, frighteningly thin, is lit on one side by a blinking blue light. A faint smile plays across his face; a beer is in his hand. She flies to him: “Dad!”
He blinks, grins. Flash of overwhelmingly blue eyes, and she is once again 5. “Ellie! Come to see the old man off after all, eh?”
“I’m getting you out of here.”
“Good god, Ellie. I’m getting morphine! Don’t mess with it.”
“It’s not funny. Give me a more detailed diagnosis.”
“Certain and welcome death. Interment in the sea. Making room for younger people who are happy to be alive.”
“You can recover.”
Her father says gently, “This is hospice. Four days of rationed grace. They know how to mete it out fine. No needles, no tubes, no machines. I skipped that. I probably got whatever I have long ago when I was torturing rare marine organisms instead of coming home to see you. Fair play.”
“Fair play? I missed you, Dad, of course I did. I needed you. But that has nothing to do with your choosing to die. What have they done so far?”
He shrugs. “Two infusions last month. Standard issue. They didn’t work.”
“You didn’t call.”
He speaks slowly, as if to a child, with equal emphasis on each word. “I just didn’t want to.”
She grasps it all, his terrible stubbornness and hers, and opens her phone.
“What are you doing?”
“Calling an ambulance.”
“Ellie, Ellie. No one will pay for it. And where do you think you’ll take me?”
“An infusion clinic. I’ll pay.”
“Not even you have that much money.”
“I have a new job offer. I’ll take care of you. I’ll sell my apartment—it’s worth a lot. We can live in the centenarian house—beautiful—interesting people. You’ll love it—”
“Don’t tell me what I’ll love.”
She sees a sheen of sweat on his forehead. She is a bit ashamed, but not enough to stop. She shouts, “You’re a foolish old man!”
He smiles. “I hope so.” He waves. “Keep talking, everybody, she’s just my daughter.” Chatter resumes. He says, quietly, “You might think that I don’t know you, Ellie, but I do. Remember that summer you spent with me after college, when you were deciding what to do with your life? Yes, too brief, but I know you like I know myself.” He pauses for a breath. “You have to do what moves you, and what moves you is your job. As it is. Whatever you’re doing, however crazy it looks to me, it works. Don’t sacrifice that job to help me. I don’t want it.
“Second point—don’t interrupt, I’m getting tired. I’ve had a great life. Despite our … tragedy. I don’t want to live anywhere but on my boat. If you do anything without my consent, I will never forgive you. I’m serious. And I don’t ever again want the kind of pain I’ve had the past six months.”
“I wouldn’t have let you have that pain!” To her surprise, Ellie begins to cry. “You hid it from me. You didn’t want my help. What has my life been about if I can’t even help my own father? You’d rather die than have my help.” She drops to the bed, covers her face, and sobs.
“Ellie, look at me.”
She wipes her face on her sleeve. “Sorry.”
“Don’t be. I haven’t seen you cry since your mother died.”
“You haven’t seen me much. Holidays. Birthdays.” She hears the 10-year-old in her voice, her two annual summer weeks at sea with her father ending once again.
“Fair shot.” He pauses. “It’s over. The oceans are polluted beyond repair.”
“You can help restore them! You—”
“This place that seems so awful to you, this is what it’s like everywhere now. Even worse. I’ve been all around the world. I’ve done my part. I’m proud that a worm is named after me.” He draws a deep breath, coughs, looks at her squarely. “I’m proud of you. Your mother would be so proud of you.” Another long pause while she grabs a tissue, blows her nose, wipes her face. “You can do one thing for me.”
“What?”
“Let’s move this party to my boat. I was kidnapped. I don’t want to die here. Order somebody to bring a piano to the dock and you can play me out. I haven’t heard you play in a long, long time. It’s like heaven to me. It always reminds me of the first time I went diving.”
“But—”
“That’s all I want of you. We can’t get back the years I wasted. Do this for me, please.”
She waits for the old anger, the old rage, to bubble up and spew out. Her hand moves toward her phone, then stops.
You know how to improvise.
Instead of the ambulance call, there is a memory, one of many she has hugged
to herself all these years, refusing to release it. It’s the new infusion that allows it to surface, she knows, but that does not make it any less valuable.
A winter day at her grandmother’s. The holidays. She is playing the piano. She begins with one learned set piece, Bach.
Then there is a shift. She hears her mother as if she were music, Coltrane, jazz. She threads new notes to Bach, adjusts cadence, moves into new space. Improvises. Loses herself in sound, falling snow, her father, leaning on the piano as tears roll down his face.
She remembers that she played for hours.
She looks directly at him, seeing him as if for the first time: a person separate from herself, from her needs, from her ways of making her own life small and safe.
She nods. “All right, Dad. Let’s go.”
CLOSE ENCOUNTERS
Andy Duncan
Andy Duncan is a South Carolina native who was a full-time journalist for twelve years. Duncan teaches writing at Frostburg State University in Maryland, where he is on the tenured English Department faculty. His stories have won the Theodore Sturgeon Award and two World Fantasy Awards. Duncan’s most recent collection, The Pottawatomie Giant and Other Stories (2012), was a Shirley Jackson Award finalist for best collection. A new novella, “Wakulla Springs,” cowritten with Ellen Klages, appeared in 2013.
“Close Encounters,” originally appeared in The Pottawatomie Giant and Other Stories, and in F&SF. It won the 2013 Nebula Award for Best Novellette. It is a masterful piece of writing, excellent in characterization and setting, with a magnetically strong narrative voice. Old Buck Nelson says he doesn’t want to be bothered by reporters anymore, even pretty girl reporters, asking again after the stories he used to tell about the alien who took him up to Mars and Venus, and the dog he brought back with him.
SHE KNOCKED ON my front door at midday on Holly Eve, so I was in no mood to answer, in that season of tricks. An old man expects more tricks than treats in this world. I let that knocker knock on. Blim, blam! Knock, knock! It hurt my concentration, and filling old hulls with powder and shot warn’t no easy task to start with, not as palsied as my hands had got in my eightieth-odd year.
“All right, damn your eyes,” I hollered as I hitched up from the table. I knocked against it and a shaker tipped over: pepper, so I let it go. My maw wouldn’t have approved of such language as that, but we all get old doing things our maws wouldn’t approve. We can’t help it, not in this disposition, on this sphere down below.
I sidled up on the door, trying to see between the edges of the curtain and the pane, but all I saw there was the screen-filtered light of the sun, which wouldn’t set in my hollow till nearabouts three in the day. Through the curtains was a shadow-shape like the top of a person’s head, but low, like a child. Probably one of those Holton boys toting an orange coin carton with a photo of some spindleshanked African child eating hominy with its fingers. Some said those Holtons was like the Johnny Cash song, so heavenly minded they’re no earthly good.
“What you want?” I called, one hand on the dead bolt and one feeling for starving-baby quarters in my pocket.
“Mr. Nelson, right? Mr. Buck Nelson? I’d like to talk a bit, if you don’t mind. Inside or on the porch, your call.”
A female, and no child, neither. I twitched back the curtain, saw a fair pretty face under a fool hat like a sideways saucer, lips painted the same black-red as her hair. I shot the bolt and opened the wood door but kept the screen latched. When I saw her full length I felt a rush of fool vanity and was sorry I hadn’t traded my overalls for fresh that morning. Her boots reached her knees but nowhere near the hem of her tight green dress. She was a little thing, hardly up to my collarbone, but a blind man would know she was full-growed. I wondered what my hair was doing in back, and I felt one hand reach around to slick it down, without my really telling it to. Steady on, son.
“I been answering every soul else calling Buck Nelson since 1894, so I reckon I should answer you, too. What you want to talk about, Miss—?”
“Miss Hanes,” she said, “and I’m a wire reporter, stringing for Associated Press.”
“A reporter,” I repeated. My jaw tightened up. My hand reached back for the doorknob as natural as it had fussed my hair. “You must have got the wrong man,” I said.
I’d eaten biscuits bigger than her tee-ninchy pocketbook, but she reached out of it a little spiral pad that she flipped open to squint at. Looked to be full of secretary-scratch, not schoolhouse writing at all. “But you, sir, are indeed Buck Nelson, Route Six, Mountain View, Missouri? Writer of a book about your travels to the Moon, and Mars, and Venus?”
By the time she fetched up at Venus her voice was muffled by the wood door I had slammed in her face. I bolted it, cursing my rusty slow reflexes. How long had it been, since fool reporters come using around? Not long enough. I limped as quick as I could to the back door, which was right quick, even at my age. It’s a small house. I shut that bolt, too, and yanked all the curtains to. I turned on the Zenith and dialed the sound up as far as it would go to drown out her blamed knocking and calling. Ever since the roof aerial blew cockeyed in the last whippoorwill storm, watching my set was like trying to read a road sign in a blizzard, but the sound blared out well enough. One of the stories was on as I settled back at the table with my shotgun hulls. I didn’t really follow those women’s stories, but I could hear Stu and Jo were having coffee again at the Hartford House and still talking about poor dead Eunice and that crazy gal what shot her because a ghost told her to. That blonde Jennifer was slap crazy, all right, but she was a looker, too, and the story hadn’t been half so interesting since she’d been packed off to the sanitarium. I was spilling powder everywhere now, what with all the racket and distraction, and hearing the story was on reminded me it was past my dinnertime anyways, and me hungry. I went into the kitchen, hooked down my grease-pan, and set it on the big burner, dug some lard out of the stand I kept in the icebox and threw that in to melt, then fisted some fresh-picked whitefish mushrooms out of their bin, rinjed them off in the sink, and rolled them in a bowl of cornmeal while I half-listened to the TV and half-listened to the city girl banging and hollering, at the back door this time. I could hear her boot heels a-thunking all hollow-like on the back porch, over the old dog bed where Teddy used to lie, where the other dog, Bo, used to try to squeeze, big as he was. She’d probably want to talk about poor old Bo, too, ask to see his grave, as if that would prove something. She had her some stick-to-it-iveness, Miss Associated Press did, I’d give her that much. Now she was sliding something under the door, I could hear it, like a field mouse gnawing its way in: a little card, like the one that Methodist preacher always leaves, only shinier. I didn’t bother to pick it up. I didn’t need nothing down there on that floor. I slid the whitefish into the hot oil without a splash. My hands had about lost their grip on gun and tool work, but in the kitchen I was as surefingered as an old woman. Well, eating didn’t mean shooting anymore, not since the power line come in, and the supermarket down the highway. Once the whitefish got to sizzling good, I didn’t hear Miss Press no more.
“This portion of Search for Tomorrow has been brought to you by … Spic and Span, the all-purpose cleaner. And by … Joy dishwashing liquid. From grease to shine in half the time, with Joy. Our story will continue in just a moment.”
I was up by times the next morning. Hadn’t kept milk cows in years. The last was Molly, she with the wet-weather horn, a funny-looking old gal but as calm and sweet as could be. But if you’ve milked cows for seventy years, it’s hard to give in and let the sun start beating you to the day. By first light I’d had my Cream of Wheat, a child’s meal I’d developed a taste for, with a little jerp of honey, and was out in the back field, bee hunting.
I had three sugar-dipped corncobs in a croker sack, and I laid one out on a hickory stump, notched one into the top of a fencepost, and set the third atop the boulder at the start of the path that drops down to the creek, past the old lick-log where the sal
t still keeps the grass from growing. Then I settled down on an old milkstool to wait. I gave up snuff a while ago because I couldn’t taste it no more and the price got so high with taxes that I purely hated putting all that government in my mouth, but I still carry some little brushes to chew on in dipping moments, and I chewed on one while I watched those three corncobs do nothing. I’d set down where I could see all three without moving my head, just by darting my eyes from one to the other. My eyes may not see Search for Tomorrow so good anymore, even before the aerial got bent, but they still can sight a honeybee coming in to sip the bait.
The cob on the stump got the first business, but that bee just smelled around and then buzzed off straightaway, so I stayed set where I was. Same thing happened to the post cob and to the rock cob, three bees come and gone. But then a big bastard, one I could hear coming in like an airplane twenty feet away, zoomed down on the fence cob and stayed there a long time, filling his hands. He rose up all lazy-like, just like a man who’s lifted the jug too many times in a sitting, and then made one, two, three slow circles in the air, marking the position. When he flew off, I was right behind him, legging it into the woods.
Mister Big Bee led me a ways straight up the slope, toward the well of the old McQuarry place, but then he crossed the bramble patch, and by the time I had worked my way anti-goddlin around that, I had lost sight of him. So I listened for a spell, holding my breath, and heard a murmur like a branch in a direction where there warn’t no branch. Sure enough, over thataway was a big hollow oak with a bee highway a-coming and a-going through a seam in the lowest fork. Tell the truth, I wasn’t rightly on my own land anymore. The McQuarry place belonged to a bank in Cape Girardeau, if it belonged to anybody. But no one had blazed this tree yet, so my claim would be good enough for any bee hunter. I sidled around to just below the fork and notched an X where any fool could see it, even me, because I had been known to miss my own signs some days, or rummage the bureau for a sock that was already on my foot. Something about the way I’d slunk toward the hive the way I’d slunk toward the door the day before made me remember Miss Press, whom I’d plumb forgotten about. And when I turned back toward home, in the act of folding my pocketknife, there she was sitting on the lumpy leavings of the McQuarry chimney, a-kicking her feet and waving at me, just like I had wished her out of the ground. I’d have to go past her to get home, as I didn’t relish turning my back on her and heading around the mountain, down the long way to the macadam and back around. Besides, she’d just follow me anyway, the way she followed me out here. I unfolded my knife again and snatched up a walnut stick to whittle on as I stomped along to where she sat.
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