by Kate Wilhelm
“You will continue.” She knew he had to. He was the work. He had no other existence.
“I worked for five years until you came, and for five years I got no results. You were the key. Somehow you were the key and I never could learn what it was that you did, how you made it work. I promise you, they will not know that. You are free to leave when you choose.”
“What will you do?” she asked. She did not know how to speak to him now, how to respond to this new face that she never had seen before. It was like meeting a stranger.
“It’s none of your business! I’ll do what I decide to do! Now get out of here! Just get your things and get out of here!”
She was almost relieved to hear the familiar screech, the furious words spoken so fast they blurred together. He rushed into his office and slammed the door. She looked around the office, but there was nothing of hers in it. Only her purse, her sweater.
She walked home slowly. Today the walkways were crowded with students and outsiders, who were always immediately identified by the sullen expressions on their faces, or the way they glared at the students and teachers. As she neared her apartment she moved faster, almost running by the time she reached it. She felt as if a burden had been removed from her, something so heavy it had been bending her lower and lower for a long time. Now she felt buoyant with relief.
“Walter!” she called from the doorway. “Walter, are you there?”
He came from the bathroom. “Hey, what happened? You got a raise? Arkins came through for you?”
Laughing, she shook her head. “He told me to get out while I can! He’s human after all. He cared enough about me to tell me to go now, because later I might not be able to.”
Walter had been moving toward her; he stopped, only a foot out of reach. “He told you what?”
“The Army’s taking over. Classified the work. I was supposed to start working full time, give up my classes, all that. Arkins told me. He said he’d lie for me, tell them I’m only an insignificant student, nothing more, no one at all important to the work.”
Abruptly Walter went to the window. He yanked the tapestry aside and stood looking out. “You can’t do it,” he said after a moment. “Nothing’s really final, is it?”
“What do you mean? I have done it. I took him up on it. He knew I would. He knew I didn’t want to work for them, especially not like that. He won’t either. He’ll go through the motions, that’s all.”
“You can still go back?”
“No! Walter, I can’t. I won’t. He understands that. Why can’t you?”
“I can, baby, but I don’t want to. We come down to the hard choices, baby, really tough ones, don’t we?”
She reached for the doorknob, for the wall, something to support her, because she had a strange feeling that she was drifting above the floor, that she was not anchored to anything.
“Just say it, Walter, whatever it is. Just say it.”
“Let’s sleep on it first. Maybe things will look different in the morning.”
She shook her head. ‘Just say it.”
“I already told you. Nothing’s changed. I can’t support you, honey. It’s that simple.”
“We’ve paid the rent a month in advance. We have that much time for me to try to find something else.”
Now he looked at her. “You won’t find anything. There isn’t anything. Ask them in one of the dorms what’s available. A month won’t make any difference. It’s just putting off the inevitable and that’s always a mistake. You have to learn to grow up and face the consequences of each and every little decision you make in this life, honey. You’ve decided, now you see the consequences. This hasn’t been a bad place. I rather hate to leave it.”
“What do you mean, leave? Where? Where can you go?”
“There’s an apartment I know about, a student I know. She invited me to share it anytime I want to. Guess it’s time now.”
“You’ve been seeing someone?”
“Not really. She just wanted me to know.”
“When are you leaving?”
“Tomorrow, the next day. No big rush. I just can’t afford to wait a month.”
“Now, Walter! Get your things and leave now, today!”
“Look, honey, don’t pull a scene. It’s been fun with you, I’ve enjoyed you tremendously. Maybe I even love you; I can’t really tell. I guess I don’t know much about love, but you’ve been wonderful and I’ve liked living with you better than with anyone else ever. . . .”
Jean twisted the knob and the door opened. She ran out and kept running for a long time. When it started to get dark she went to her friend Corinne Duland. “May I stay the night? On a chair, anything?”
Corinne asked no questions, but fed her dinner, and then gave her a pillow and blanket and left her while she went to teach her evening class. Jean huddled on the couch all night, and at ten the next morning she returned to her apartment and found that he had taken his possessions and had left. She closed the door and locked it, and then she sat in the silent room and stared at the book wall, now almost empty. She might weep later, or throw things around, or become hysterical, or react in some way, but not yet. She felt numb and had trouble remembering where she was or why she was staring dry-eyed at the wall before her.
She tried to visualize Walter, but his face did not appear. She could not think how his voice sounded. Instead she kept seeing Colonel Cluny that night he had come to tell her and her mother that her father was dead. How gray he had been, how wounded looking, sick. “They’ve done it again,” she whispered. And although the words did not seem to make any sense when she heard them, even repeated them, she knew they really did.
CHAPTER
7
CORINNE DULAND was a heavy woman with steel-gray hair, snapping black eyes, and a wide full mouth. She was handsome in her midyears; somehow everyone forgot she was twenty pounds overweight, and that her hair was gray. She made no attempt to hide her years, and as a consequence they seemed insignificant.
“Are you positive you can’t go back to Leo?”
“Positive. It’s all Army intelligence now. And Arkins. He told me they had planned to dismiss me if he hadn’t done it first. As far as they’re concerned, I don’t exist, except as one of his students.” Often during these past few weeks she had caught herself wondering if this was why she had never wanted her name connected with his research, if she had realized, and repressed, that this could easily become government business, army business.
“You have to do something, dear,” Corinne said again. She had brought cheese and crackers and a bottle of wine, and they, had finished off everything. “How long do you have? Five days, six? They won’t give you an extra minute. If you’re not out, they send movers and throw your stuff into the street and then charge you with littering.”
Jean nodded. They had been over it all half a dozen times already, and there was nothing left to say. Her mother was ill and was living with her only sister and her husband, two children and one grandchild. She could not go there. They would not welcome her, she knew. Her grandparents were living in a mobile home settlement on Whidbey Island, north of Seattle. Also impossible. They had held out in Oregon until the hospital closed and the doctors left. There were two or three cousins, but they were from San Bernardino, and wherever they had found to live, she was certain she did not want to live with them. There were no jobs in Lansing or East Lansing, or anywhere else, as far as she knew.
“I’ll sign up for canal work,” she said.
“Nope. What are you, five two? One hundred pounds on a good day, and there haven’t been many good days lately. You have to go to your aunt, Jean. There’s always room for one more.”
Jean shook her head. She couldn’t even become a prostitute, she thought bitterly. There was too much competition already among the displaced women.
Corinne had not offered to let her move into the studio apartment. Jean was glad. Admitting there was a possibility of sharing the room, even if it was only
a gesture, would have raised guilt and resentment. Their friendship was not deep enough to have survived, and Jean needed a friend now. The two women and Corinne’s many callers, who more often than not spent the night—it was almost funny enough to laugh at. Jean smiled to herself, thinking how she could hide behind a screen while Corinne entertained.
The silence grew, until finally Jean said, “I guess I’ll just have to be a guest of the government for a short time.” For two weeks she had denied it would come down to that. She had sent out dozens of applications for jobs, had written to everyone who might know of a job, and each day she had fought with herself not to call her mother, her grandfather, someone to come help. They couldn’t help, she thought clearly. No one could.
Corinne was nodding thoughtfully. “Okay,” she said. “Which one? Some are worse than others. Not in the Northeast; too goddamn cold. Around here?”
Jean shook her head.
“Chicago? That might be the best. They were first and have had time to get some kind of organization anyway. Don’t take anything that you want to keep. Only your clothes, toothbrush, comb, stuff like that. Anything you want stored, I’ll take care of for you. Including any money you have. And I’ll send you cash each week; you’ll need it for little things. And for God’s sake don’t tell anyone you have a cent!” Jean looked at the small living room with its pretty tapestries, the books she had loved. “You take it all,” she said, dismissing everything in the apartment. “Anything you want, take. The rest can be tossed in the gutter.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. We’ll have a sale. Saturday. I’ll put your money in my safe at the office. When you want it, it’ll be there. I expect in a couple of weeks you’ll be ready to go to your aunt’s house. We’ll have to make an inventory of your stuff. . . .”
Her room was nine by eleven. It was painted tan. There was a bed, a chair, a built-in dresser with four drawers, and a plastic mirror bolted to the wall over it. There was a wood-dowel clothes rod with no hangers. A narrow window had a green shade with a triangular hole in the lower right corner.
She sat down on the bed and stared at the window. “I’ll pretend it’s a dorm room,” she whispered. “I’m a freshman again, starting all over. I’ll get a curtain.”
Then she lay down and stared at the window until the light behind it faded. She could hear people on both sides of her cubicle. A woman and a man arguing on one side; a woman and a child giggling madly on the other. When the child stopped chattering and laughing, the woman started to weep. Her head must have been only inches away from Jean’s, the thin wall separating them. There were other sounds, from the hallway. Ever since she had entered the room, they had continued unabated; people going one way, then the other, back again. Running feet, dragging feet, plodding feet; voices laughing, scolding, crying; sometimes scuffling noises, a fight two times, something breaking with a crash that made the walls shake. . . .
There was a cafeteria, where scrip was accepted. Dinner was at six and Jean missed it on her first day. Breakfast was from seven to eight, and when she got to the building, there was already a line that extended farther than a city block.
She got in line behind a woman with three children who kept darting away first in one direction, then the other.
There was mud everywhere, around the buildings, between them, oozing over the sidewalks made of wood chips, cinders, and crushed stones. The children became muddier and muddier as the line straggled toward the door of the gray building. The woman didn’t try to stop the children, nor did she pay any attention to them as they swooped back to her, then away, over and over again. She looked at Jean once, an appraising scrutiny that seemed to dismiss her almost instantly; then she looked straight ahead, oblivious of everything around her.
A couple in line behind Jean, a middle-aged man and woman, argued in soft voices all the way up to the door.
“We can find it this time, I know we can,” the woman was insisting, pleading. “I dreamed where to drill, and I know we can find it this time.”
“There ain’t nothing to find. We tried a hundred times. It ain’t there.”
“But we didn’t try back behind the garage, in the corner under the fence. That’s where it is. . .
Jean tried not to listen. More people had joined the line behind them, and it seemed the line would stay the same length forever, no matter how many people finally reached the door and vanished inside.
For breakfast there were dried eggs, scrambled with too much water, a piece of white bread, and watery coffee. The room was like an army mess hall, or a prison dining room. Gray walls, long tables with an aisle down the middle, benches to sit on. There was mud all over the floor, some of it still wet and treacherous, some dried like old blood.
Jean tried not to look at the people as she ate, but again and again she found herself gazing at them. Some wore good clothes, some were in rags; some had watches, wedding rings, most had no jewelry at all. But they were alike, she thought, all of them were alike. They all had deep circles under their eyes, and they all looked haunted.
Close to her ear a voice asked, “New here?”
She jerked around to see a young woman, dark-haired, haunted like all the rest. She nodded.
“Thought so. You don’t even smell like the rest of us. Where you from?”
Without a thought Jean said, “Oregon.”
“Tried to hold out? Some are still trying, so I hear. You through? Come on, guided-tour time.” She led the way out, saying over her shoulder as they walked, “Maggie. I’m in G building, room 421. Been here a year. You got any cigarettes?”
“Sorry,” Jean said.
“Didn’t think you would,” Maggie said cheerfully. “Never hurts to ask.”
They stood outside the cafeteria and looked at the Newtown. The streets were twenty feet wide, the buildings twenty feet apart and six stories high. There were no trees, no grass, no bushes, nothing but the mud and the poor sidewalks sinking into it. The buildings stretched out in all directions. The streets were crowded now and there were children everywhere, screaming, yelling. One hundred fifty thousand people lived in this one Newtown. Most of them seemed to be on the streets, Jean thought.
“Where are they going?”
“Nowhere. Nowhere to go. Anything’s better than the prison cells. You’ll see. Come on. Laundry’s over there. This one’s ours, for this section. You have to sign up to use it. Don’t forget or you’ll get pretty filthy in no time at all. This goddamned mud was built in.”
“Is there a library?”
Maggie gave her a curious look, shrugged, and led the way. The library building was a copy of the cafeteria, down to the line stretched out in front of it. “They give you ten minutes, no more. One book, if they have any by the time you get there.”
Maggie took her to the rec building, where people were crowded together playing cards, checkers, chess; there were Ping-Pong tables, but no equipment for them. There was a piano that someone was banging on in another room; dancing, Maggie said. Large wall television sets were on. They were badly focused, loud, with dozens of people before each one. They left the building to continue the tour.
There were a few shops with toilet articles, some magazines and paperback books. Each shop had a police officer stationed in it. There was a movie theater.
Jean scowled at the goods. The scrip issued was exactly enough for meals and laundry. Anything else had to come out of meal money, or whatever savings the people had hidden away.
“You like to fuck?” Maggie asked suddenly.
Jean stared at her. “Why?”
“You can pick up some spare jingle-jangle that way. Make them pay for it—quarter, dollar, whatever you can get.”
“Where do they get money?”
“That’s their business. You want to start up a little on the side, give me the word and I’ll pass it around.”
“I don’t think so; not yet anyway.”
Maggie shrugged. “They’ll take you anyway; might as well make them pay s
omething.”
They walked to the playground, and it was like the rest of the complex, overcrowded, too much screaming and yelling and crying, too much mud, not enough equipment. There were schools, but they were like everything else, Maggie said. Jean decided not to look in on them.
“What do you do all day every day?”
“Nothing. Hang out. Fuck around. Go to town sometimes, look at the stuff in windows, panhandle a little.”
Jean remembered the new people who had entered her classes, empty looking, haunted, obscene, full of hatred for her and everyone else who lived in apartments or houses, worked and made a living. Her head began to ache and she went back to her room, leaving Maggie near the rec building.
All afternoon Jean lay on her cot, staring at the hole in the green shade. The woman and child returned next door and began laughing at something. She admired the woman and wished she would shut up.
Finally the thought of going without food until morning drove her from her room, out to the muddy street, past the two gray buildings between her own and the cafeteria, and back into the line.
Maggie was lounging near the door, laughing with three other women, all very young, all with muddy jeans, two of them barefoot. Maggie could not have been more than eighteen or nineteen, the others probably a bit younger, Jean thought, watching them flirt slyly with the men in line. There were very few men, she realized, and for the most part they were either middle-aged or older, or teen-aged. She remembered what she had read about the Newtowns: the men were the primary source of friction, the article had said; consequently they were put to work if and when it was possible. She felt her hands tighten as she looked around at the haunted, empty women. Maggie saw her in line and hurried over to introduce her friends, Rosa, Susan, Bettyjean.
“Honey, I forgot to warn you before. Don’t wander around after supper if you’re alone. You know?”
“We’ll be in the rec room; come on over after you eat. You play cards?” Bettyjean asked. She was the youngest of them all, probably no more than fifteen, and she was very pretty, with light brown hair that was cut so short it looked babyish.
