The Changed Man

by Orson Scott Card

  Howard was taken home in an ambulance, and they wheeled him into the house and lifted him from the stretcher to the bed. Through it all Alice hardly said a word except to direct them to the bedroom. Howard lay still on the bed as she stood over him, the two of them alone for the first time since he left the house a month ago.

  “It was kind of you,” Howard said softly, “to let me come back.”

  “They said there wasn’t room enough to keep you, but you needed to be watched and taken care of for a few weeks. So lucky me, I get to watch you.” Her voice was a low monotone, but the acid dripped from every word. It stung.

  “You were right, Alice,” Howard said.

  “Right about what? That marrying you was the worst mistake of my life? No, Howard. Meeting you was my worst mistake.”

  Howard began to cry. Real tears that welled up from places in him that had once been deep but that now rested painfully close to the surface. “I’ve been a monster, Alice. I haven’t had any control over myself. What I did to Rhiannon—Alice, I wanted to die, I wanted to die!”

  Alice’s face was twisted and bitter. “And I wanted you to, Howard. I have never been so disappointed as when the doctor called and said you’d be all right. You’ll never be all right, Howard, you’ll always be—”

  “Let him be, Mother.”

  Rhiannon stood in the doorway.

  “Don’t come in, Rhiannon,” Alice said.

  Rhiannon came in. “Daddy, it’s all right.”

  “What she means,” Alice said,”is that we’ve checked her and she isn’t pregnant. No little monster is going to be born.”

  Rhiannon didn’t look at her mother, just gazed with wide eyes at her father. “You didn’t need to—hurt yourself, Daddy. I forgive you. People lose control sometimes. And it was as much my fault as yours, it really was, you don’t need to feel bad, Father.”

  It was too much for Howard. He cried out, shouted his confession, how he had manipulated her all his life, how he was an utterly selfish and rotten parent, and when it was over Rhiannon came to her father and laid her head on his chest and said, softly, “Father, it’s all right. We are who we are. We’ve done what we’ve done. But it’s all right now. I forgive you.”

  When Rhiannon left, Alice said, “You don’t deserve her.”

  I know.

  “I was going to sleep on the couch, but that would be stupid. Wouldn’t it, Howard?”

  I deserve to be left alone, like a leper.

  “You misunderstand, Howard. I need to stay here to make sure you don’t do anything else. To yourself or to anyone.”

  Yes. Yes, please. I can’t be trusted.

  “Don’t wallow in it, Howard. Don’t enjoy it. Don’t make yourself even more disgusting than you were before.”

  All right.

  They were drifting off to sleep when Alice said, “Oh, when the doctor called he wondered if I knew what had caused those sores all over your arms and chest.”

  But Howard was asleep, and didn’t hear her. Asleep with no dreams at all, the sleep of peace, the sleep of having been forgiven, of being clean. It hadn’t taken that much, after all. Now that it was over, it was easy. He felt as if a great weight had been taken from him.

  He felt as if something heavy was lying on his legs. He awoke, sweating even though the room was not hot. He heard breathing. And it was not Alice’s low-pitched, slow breath, it was quick and high and hard, as if the breather had been exerting himself.

  Itself.

  Themselves.

  One of them lay across his legs, the flippers plucking at the blanket. The other two lay on either side, their eyes wide and intent, creeping slowly toward where his face emerged from the sheets.

  Howard was puzzled. “I thought you’d be gone,” he said to the children. “You’re supposed to be gone now.”

  Alice stirred at the sound of his voice, mumbled in her sleep.

  He saw more of them stirring in the gloomy corners of the room, another writhing slowly along the top of the dresser, another inching up the wall toward the ceiling.

  “I don’t need you anymore,” he said, his voice oddly high-pitched.

  Alice started breathing irregularly, mumbling, “What? What?”

  And Howard said nothing more, just lay there in the sheets, watching the creatures carefully but not daring to make a sound for fear Alice would wake up. He was terribly afraid she would wake up and not see the creatures, which would prove, once and for all, that he had lost his mind.

  He was even more afraid, however, that when she awoke she would see them. That was the one unbearable thought, yet he thought it continuously as they relentlessly approached with nothing at all in their eyes, not even hate, not even anger, not even contempt. We are with you, they seemed to be saying, we will be with you from now on. We will be with you, Howard, forever.

  And Alice rolled over and opened her eyes.

  QUIETUS

  IT CAME TO him suddenly, a moment of blackness as he sat working late at his desk. It was as quick as an eye-blink, but before the darkness the papers on his desk had seemed terribly important, and afterward he stared at them blankly, wondering what they were and then realizing that he didn’t really give a damn what they were and he ought to be going home now.

  Ought definitely to be going home now. And C. Mark Tapworth of CMT Enterprises, Inc., arose from his desk without finishing all the work that was on it, the first time he had done such a thing in the twelve years it had taken him to bring the company from nothing to a multi-million-dollar-a-year business. Vaguely it occurred to him that he was not acting normally, but he didn’t really care, it didn’t really matter to him a bit whether any more people bought—bought—

  And for a few seconds C. Mark Tapworth could not remember what it was that his company made.

  It frightened him. It reminded him that his father and his uncles had all died of strokes. It reminded him of his mother’s senility at the fairly young age of sixty-eight. It reminded him of something he had always known and never quite believed, that he was mortal and that all the works of all his days would trivialize gradually until his death, at which time his life would be his only act, the forgotten stone whose fall had set off ripples in the lake that would in time reach the shore having made, after all, no difference.

  I’m tired, he decided. Maryjo is right. I need a rest.

  But he was not the resting kind, not until that moment standing by his desk when again the blackness came, this time a jog in his mind and he remembered nothing, saw nothing, heard nothing, was falling interminably through nothingness.

  Then, mercifully, the world returned to him and he stood trembling, regretting now the many, many nights he had stayed far too late, the many hours he had not spent with MaryJo, had left her alone in their large but childless house; and he imagined her waiting for him forever, a lonely woman dwarfed by the huge living room, waiting patiently for a husband who would, who must, who always had come home.

  Is it my heart? Or a stroke? he wondered. Whatever it was, it was enough that he saw the end of the world lurking in the darkness that had visited him, and like the prophet returning from the mount things that once had mattered overmuch mattered not at all, and things he had long postponed now silently importuned him. He felt a terrible urgency that there was something he must do before—

  Before what? He would not let himself answer. He just walked out through the large room full of ambitious younger men and women trying to impress him by working later than he; noticed but did not care that they were visibly relieved at their reprieve from another endless night. He walked out into the night and got in his car and drove home through a thin mist of rain that made the world retreat a comfortable distance from the windows of his car.

  The children must be upstairs, he realized. No one ran to greet him at the door. The children, a boy and a girl half his height and twice his energy, were admirable creatures who ran down stairs as if they were skiing, who could no more hold completely still than
a hummingbird in midair. He could hear their footsteps upstairs, running lightly across the floor. They hadn’t come to greet him at the door because their lives, after all, had more important things in them than mere fathers. He smiled, set down his attaché case, and went to the kitchen.

  MaryJo looked harried, upset. He recognized the signals instantly—she had cried earlier today.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing,” she said, because she always said Nothing. He knew that in a moment she would tell him. She always told him everything, which had sometimes made him impatient. Now as she moved silently back and forth from counter to counter, from cupboard to stove, making another perfect dinner, he realized that she was not going to tell him. It made him uncomfortable. He began to try to guess.

  “You work too hard,” he said. “I’ve offered to get a maid or a cook. We can certainly afford them.”

  MaryJo only smiled thinly. “I don’t want anyone else mucking around in the kitchen,” she said. “I thought we dropped that subject years ago. Did you—did you have a hard day at the office?”

  Mark almost told her about his strange lapses of memory, but caught himself. This would have to be led up to gradually. Maryjo would not be able to cope with it, not in the state she was already in. “Not too hard. Finished up early.”

  “I know,” she said. “I’m glad.”

  She didn’t sound glad. It irritated him a little. Hurt his feelings. But instead of going off to nurse his wounds, he merely noticed his emotions as if he were a dispassionate observer. He saw himself; important self-made man, yet at home a little boy who can be hurt, not even by a word, but by a short pause of indecision. Sensitive, sensitive, and he was amused at himself: for a moment he almost saw himself standing a few inches away, could observe even the bemused expression on his own face.

  “Excuse me,” MaryJo said, and she opened a cupboard door as he stepped out of the way. She pulled out a pressure cooker. “We’re out of potato flakes,” she said. “Have to do it the primitive way.” She dropped the peeled potatoes into the pan.

  “The children are awfully quiet today,” he said. “Do you know what they’re doing?”

  MaryJo looked at him with a bewildered expression.

  “They didn’t come meet me at the door. Not that I mind. They’re busy with their own concerns, I know.”

  “Mark,” MaryJo said.

  “All right, you see right through me so easily. But I was only a little hurt. I want to look through today’s mail.” He wandered out of the kitchen. He was vaguely aware that behind him Maryjo had started to cry again. He did not let it worry him much. She cried easily and often.

  He wandered into the living room, and the furniture surprised him. He had expected to see the green sofa and chair that he had bought from Deseret Industries, and the size of the living room and the tasteful antiques looked utterly wrong. Then his mind did a quick turn and he remembered that the old green sofa and chair were fifteen years ago, when he and MaryJo had first married. Why did I expect to see them? he wondered, and he worried again; worried also because he had come into the living room expecting to find the mail, even though for years MaryJo had put it on his desk every day.

  He went into his study and picked up the mail and started sorting through it until he noticed out of the corner of his eye that something large and dark and massive was blocking the lower half of one of the windows. He looked. It was a coffin, a rather plain one, sitting on a rolling table from a mortuary.

  “MaryJo,” he called. “MaryJo.”

  She came into the study, looking afraid. “Yes?”

  “Why is there a coffin in my study?” he asked.

  “Coffin?” she asked.

  “By the window, MaryJo. How did it get here?”

  She looked disturbed. “Please don’t touch it,” she said.

  “Why not?”

  “I can’t stand seeing you touch it. I told them they could leave it here for a few hours. But now it looks like it has to stay all night.” The idea of the coffin staying in the house any longer was obviously repugnant to her.

  “Who left it here? And why us? It’s not as if we’re in the market. Or do they sell these at parties now, like Tupperware?”

  “The bishop called and asked me—asked me to let the mortuary people leave it here for the funeral tomorrow. He said nobody could get away to unlock the church and so could we take it here for a few hours—”

  It occurred to him that the mortuary would not have parted with a funeral-bound coffin unless it were full.

  “MaryJo, is there a body in this?”

  She nodded, and a tear slipped over her lower eyelid. He was aghast. He let himself show it. “They left a corpse in a coffin here in the house with you all day? With the kids?”

  She buried her face in her hands and ran from the room, ran upstairs.

  Mark did not follow her. He stood there and regarded the coffin with distaste. At least they had the good sense to close it. But a coffin! He went to the telephone at his desk, dialed the bishop’s number.

  “He isn’t here.” The bishop’s wife sounded irritated at his call.

  “He has to get this body out of my office and out of my house tonight. This is a terrible imposition.”

  “I don’t know where to reach him. He’s a doctor, you know, Brother Tapworth. He’s at the hospital. Operating. There’s no way I can contact him for something like this.”

  “So what am I supposed to do?”

  She got surprisingly emotional about it. “Do what you want! Push the coffin out in the street if you want! It’ll just be one more hurt to the poor man!”

  “Which brings me to another question. Who is he, and why isn’t his family—”

  “He doesn’t have a family, Brother Tapworth. And he doesn’t have any money. I’m sure he regrets dying in our ward, but we just thought that even though he had no friends in the world someone might offer him a little kindness on his way out of it.”

  Her intensity was irresistible, and Mark recognized the hopelessness of getting rid of the box that night. “As long as it’s gone tomorrow,” he said. A few amenities, and the conversation ended. Mark sat in his chair staring angrily at the coffin. He had come home worried about his health. And found a coffin to greet him when he came. Well, at least it explained why poor MaryJo had been so upset. He heard the children quarreling upstairs. Well, let MaryJo handle it. Their problems would take her mind off this box, anyway.

  And so he sat and stared at the coffin for two hours, and had no dinner, and did not particularly notice when MaryJo came downstairs and took the burnt potatoes out of the pressure cooker and threw the entire dinner away and lay down on the sofa in the living room and wept. He watched the patterns of the grain of the coffin, as subtle as flames, winding along the wood. He remembered having taken naps at the age of five in a makeshift bedroom behind a plywood partition in his parents’ small home. The wood grain there had been his way of passing the empty sleepless hours. In those days he had been able to see shapes: clouds and faces and battles and monsters. But on the coffin, the wood grain looked more complex and yet far more simple. A road map leading upward to the lid. An engineering drawing describing the decomposition of the body. A graph at the foot of the patient’s bed, saying nothing to the patient but speaking death into the trained physician’s mind. Mark wondered, briefly, about the bishop, who was even now operating on someone who might very well end up in just such a box as this.

  And finally his eyes hurt and he looked at the clock and felt guilty about having spent so long closed off in his study on one of his few nights home early from the office. He meant to get up and find MaryJo and take her up to bed. But instead he got up and went to the coffin and ran his hands along the wood. It felt like glass, because the varnish was so thick and smooth. It was as if the living wood had to be kept away, protected from the touch of a hand. But the wood was not alive, was it? It was being put into the ground also to decompose. The varnish might keep
it alive longer. He thought whimsically of what it would be like to varnish a corpse, to preserve it. The Egyptians would have nothing on us then, he thought.

  “Don’t,” said a husky voice from the door. It was MaryJo, her eyes red-rimmed, her face looking slept in.

  “Don’t what?” Mark asked her. She didn’t answer, just glanced down at his hands. To his surprise, Mark noticed that his thumbs were under the lip of the coffin lid, as if to lift it.

  “I wasn’t going to open it,” he said.

  “Come upstairs,” MaryJo said.

  “Are the children asleep?”

  He had asked the question innocently, but her face was immediately twisted with pain and grief and anger.

  “Children?” she asked. “What is this? And why tonight?”

  He leaned against the coffin in suprise. The wheeled table moved slightly.

  “We don’t have any children,” she said.

  And Mark remembered with horror that she was right. On the second miscarriage, the doctor had tied her tubes because any further pregnancies would risk her life. There were no children, none at all, and it had devastated her for years; it was only through Mark’s great patience and utter dependability that she had been able to stay out of the hospital. Yet when he came home tonight—he tried to remember what he had heard when he came home. Surely he had heard the children running back and forth upstairs. Surely—

  “I haven’t been well,” he said.

  “If it was a joke, it was sick.”

  “It wasn’t a joke—it was—” But again he couldn’t, at least didn’t tell her about the strange memory lapses at the office, even though this was even more proof that something was wrong. He had never had any children in his home, their brothers and sisters had all been discreetly warned not to bring children around poor MaryJo, who was quite distraught to be—the Old Testament word?—barren.

  And he had talked about having children all evening.

  “Honey, I’m sorry,” he said, trying to put his whole heart into the apology.