Fictions

by Nancy Kress

  “He likes you, Cath. I can tell. Can’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, does he totally gross you out, or what? Could you maybe admit there’s a slight chance you possibly might like him back, perhaps?”

  I didn’t answer.

  Janet sighed. “Cath? I don’t get it. Talk to me, Cath.”

  I felt dizzy. This was the first time it had happened like this. I never got to meet them. Janet held my arm too tight; there were needles in my wrist, in my fingers. I fought off that swooping black blur that meant fainting. Not here, not here.

  “Janet—he could be the one.”

  But there was no way she could understand that. “The one? The one for what? For love? For sex? For laughs? So have a cup of coffee and find out—what on earth do you have to lose?”

  I made myself look away. Janet let go of my arm. I could feel her gaze move over my face, searching and concerned. Beyond her Jack stared pointedly at the line of the library roof against the sky. The two women gestured at each other and talked at the same time; the one who was not Jennifer’s mother raised her hand to shield her eyes in theatrical despair, then laughed through spread fingers. At the end of the street, the limping figure of Dr. Jarlson turned the corner. The red car came from the library parking lot, already too fast, less than thirty feet away. I saw Jack turn, and I saw the moment his face changed as he dropped his book and barreled towards the street. Notebook paper fluttered from between the pages like white leaves.

  Jennifer raised her small face. Brakes squealed. The mother’s face went to pieces. Jack pushed past her but he was too late: her scream and Janet’s came the same second as the thud of flesh on metal, both screams less shrill than the screech of brakes followed by the clash of metal on metal as the red car swerved broadside and plowed into a jeep parked across the street, Winnie-the-Pooh crushed in the grillwork between them.

  We sat in the back booth of a bar none of us would have chosen, Janet and I together and Jack across from us. Janet’s hands were still shaking. Her eyes, red and swollen from crying, kept darting around the table without meeting either of ours. I held her left hand tightly; on the table top Jack grasped the right. “It happened so fast!”

  “I know,” I said. She had said the same thing at least thirty times. Jack and I exchanged worried glances. Janet’s glass ring, unseen, cut into my fingers.

  “I keep seeing the mother, you know? Afterward. Kneeling in the street like that, with all the blood, and that baby . . .”

  “Sshhh,” I said, senselessly. “Sssshhhh, Janet.”

  Our drinks sat untouched, ice cubes melting. Jack bent his head a little and his hair fell forward over his face. The thick dark hair needed cutting. He hadn’t cried like Janet, like me, but the skin around his mouth had a pinched, soft look; I thought confusedly of Dr. Jarlson’s old face, his hurt leg.

  “It just happened so fast.” Suddenly Janet gathered up her coat, books, purse. “Look, I have to go. Tim gets out of class in ten minutes. I said I’d meet him.”

  “I’ll go with you,” Jack said.

  “No, no—I’m fine.”

  I said, “We’ll both go with you. Please, Janet.”

  She stopped scrambling for her things and looked directly at me from puffy eyes. Almost never, not in all our years together, had I seen Janet’s face in repose, without her usual frantic animation, quiet clear to the skull.

  “I’d rather you didn’t come with me, Cath. You either, Jack. Tim will be waiting for me and I’d rather tell him by myself about . . . this, and just be with him, you know?”

  “We know,” Jack said. Janet smiled painfully and slid out of the booth. I watched her cross the bar and open the door. A rectangle of light fell inwards, narrowed, disappeared.

  Jack leaned towards me across the table. “You all right?”

  “I’m all right.”

  “Are you sure? Sometimes it’s the people who don’t scream and cry over something like that, who hold it all in, who hurt the most.” Abruptly, incongruously, he blushed. “I don’t mean to psychoanalyze you, I know I hardly know you. I’m sorry. I just thought that if you wanted to talk about what happened, or anything, I’d like to listen.”

  “Thanks,” I said. I tried to smile at him, failed. To cover that, I reached for my coat and said, “Janet will be all right, too.”

  “I know. She has Tim. They have a good thing going.”

  “Yes. And she’s brave. She’s always been brave. I’ve known her all my life.”

  “Brave?” He looked for a moment as if he didn’t understand, and then as if he did. “Yeah, you’re right. I know what you mean. She is.”

  “I don’t know what I would do if it had been her,” I said, amazed that I could say it to him, amazed that I could say it at all.

  He fumbled with his beer. “Can I walk you to your next class, Cath?” I was afraid it might happen again but the moment stayed put, mercifully in sequence, no more distinct than any other. Still, I knew I would remember him in that particular moment: hopeful quizzical eyes, hair falling over his forehead, neck strong over the clumsy cable-knit of the brown sweater. There was no thickening around him, no blue-veined glass. He had not been the one, after all. Instead, he was like the others, the ones left behind: like Dr. Jarlson with his arthritic limp, like Jennifer’s mother sobbing in the bloody street. Like me. He kept on looking at me and he smiled, uncertain and shadowed but still a smile, stronger than his blushing or his fumbling with the beer. They were brave people, Janet and Tim and Jack. Very brave.

  “Well?” he said.

  “You can’t walk me anywhere,” I said, and got up and went out and left him there.

  1988

  CRAPS

  Are the seemingly random events which punctuate our lives really due simply to the throw of the die . . .?

  I shall never believe that God plays dice with the world.

  —Albert Einstein

  Gotta have the game or we’ll die of shame.

  —Nathan Detroit

  Charlie Foster was doing lunch with a client at the Burrowing Fern when he choked on a chunk of broccoli al dente in the Fettucine Pri- mavera. His throat and chest spasmed painfully but he nonetheless tried to smile reassuringly at the client, Marv Spanmann of Spanmann Associates, who thought Charlie was having trouble with a partial bridge and so tactfully excused himself to the men’s room. With Marv gone, Charlie batted himself on the chest while swallowing hard. When that didn’t work he stood up, knocking over an unoccupied chair, clawing at the air and pointing to his throat. “My God,” said someone at the next table, “that man’s choking!”

  The Heimlich maneuver, even as performed by a massive Swedish bartender, didn’t help. However, some air must have been getting through the broccoli because Charlie didn’t lose complete consciousness. Someone called an ambulance. Charlie staggered forward, knocking over two more chairs and an order of Chicken Greco. Marv Spanmann returned from the men’s room and knelt by Charlie, now gasping on the floor, to say, “Don’t worry, Chuck, whatever happens, you’ve definitely got the account!” Women moaned; a siren screamed.

  In the ambulance Charlie kept trying to breathe, huge futile gasps that tossed his body from side to side and sent up waves of garlic from the spilled Chicken Greco. The paramedic was still trying to strap him down when the ambulance collided with a silver Mercedes Benz at the corner of Broad and Exchange. The impact dislodged the broccoli and sent it flying against the back windshield. Charlie sucked in air.

  The paramedic, after making sure that normal color had returned to Charlie’s fingernails, jumped out of the back of the ambulance. The driver of the Mercedes stood with his fists raised, shouting at the ambulance driver, who shrugged. The passenger door of the Mercedes was folded on itself like sloppy origami. Its owner, still shouting, reached inside for a winged corkscrew and used it to gouge the hood of the ambulance, right above the grill.

  Shaky, Charlie stood up and poked at the piece of broccoli, which
lay on the ambulance floor just inside the open back door. The broccoli was slimed with saliva flecked with blood. A small boy in a Pepsi cap peered into the ambulance to see if anyone inside happened to be dead; Charlie glared and the small face disappeared.

  Leaving the broccoli, Charlie slowly climbed out of the ambulance in time to see the paramedic lunge at the owner of the Mercedes, trying to take the corkscrew away from him. The ambulance driver circled behind the struggling pair, grabbed the Mercedes owner, and pinned his arms against his body. The paramedic yanked away the corkscrew and immediately began asking witnesses for their names and addresses. The Mercedes owner shouted incoherently. Charlie caught a cab and went home.

  “Well, that was certainly a freak accident,” Charlie’s wife Patti said. She didn’t sound especially interested, once she had learned that Charlie was all right. Slim and blonde, with the pale polished look of an opal, Patti nonetheless had a growing reputation in the field of subatomic particle physics. Her degrees were from Stanford, she interned at the Fermi Lab, and her IQ was 163. Over the years of their marriage, which had begun when they were both undergraduates, Charlie had grown unadmittedly afraid of her. They had no children.

  “Well, I think it was more than a freak,” Charlie said. “These things don’t just happen.” He had no idea what he meant.

  Patti looked at him a long moment. Then she put her arms around him, cool arms in a sleeveless summer dress. “You didn’t get enough attention for your brush with death . . . poor baby!”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Charlie mumbled, heard himself lying, and added with energy, “It’s just that these things don’t just happen!”

  “Only to you,” Patti said, smiled, and let him go to return to her notebooks full of precise mathematical symbols the convoluted shapes of broccoli.

  Marv Spanmann kept his word and gave the Spanmann account, a quarterly newsletter plus promotion film and four-color brochure, to Charlie’s agency. The job would bill at least $125,000, and Charlie’s boss, who had been writing a government manual all week, made several hearty jokes about impressing clients with simulated asphyxiation in trendy yuppie restaurants (SATYR). The junior copywriter, art director, and secretary all laughed. Charlie, however, felt that his own laughter was curiously forced, which embarrassed him. He avoided further discussion of his accident.

  Three days later, he decided to walk home from work. Patti was in Chicago at a scientific conference. The city summer was in full, hot, rich swing. Women pushed past in sandals and pastel skirts, carrying shopping bags with bright logos. Store window mannequins held tennis rackets perpetually upraised. The air swelled redolent with potted flowers, street-repair machinery, hot pretzels and hotter pavement. Jackham- mers and rock music mingled with the insistent braking of overcrowded buses. Over it all lay the golden, dusty light of late afternoon. Charlie, who twenty years before and for no discernible reason had been an anthropology major, thought confusedly of the vital, brawling cities of ancient Sumeria, and tried to remember where Sumeria was.

  At the comer of Main and Clark stood the Cathedral of the Holy Name, a vast dark pile of cool stone. The bushes beneath the cathedral windows hadn’t been pruned; they straggled over the sills and up the massive walls. Charlie shaded his eyes and leaned back his head to see the place where the top of the cathedral spire pierced the sky. A brick dislodged from the architrave below the spire and fell straight toward him.

  The brick seemed to fall too fast for him to dodge, yet slow enough for him to think, “Well—now this is it.” But it wasn’t. A huge pigeon flew from behind Charlie, crashed into the falling brick, and died instantly. Brick and pigeon deflected from their previous trajectories. The brick missed Charlie by three inches, shattering on the pavement into subbricks which bounded and ricocheted, although not off him. The pigeon hit the sidewalk in a bloody splat and lay there looking at Charlie from black eyes. Fine red brick dust settled over his shoes.

  Charlie lowered himself to sit in the middle of the sidewalk. A woman rushed up to him to ask if he were hurt. A bearded young man carrying a Walkman sprinted up the cathedral steps and began to pound on the wooden door, demanding someone in authority. A man pressed upon Charlie a business card, which said: MARTIN CASSIDY—ATTORNEY AT LAW—LITIGATION SPECIALIST. Charlie put the card in his vest pocket and looked up at the woman. She had a plain, middle-aged face furrowed with concern.

  He said simply, “That was divine intervention.”

  Immediately the concern left the woman’s face. Her eyes, chin, mouth, and eyebrows all wavered into suspicion: of his sanity, of her own involvement. Charlie saw the change and tried to laugh. The laugh was shaky, but he fortified it with a humorous, self-mocking shrug that he often used to good effect with clients who had come up through the manufacturing ranks and so suspected ad agencies of superciliousness. The woman seemed reassured. She helped Charlie to his feet. He looked once more at the cathedral, the particles of brick, and the dark unfathomable eyes of the dead pigeon, and over him went a shudder which he did not understand but which, in some way he also did not understand, pleased the part of him that had wondered about Sumeria.

  “Books?” Patti said.

  “Books,” Charlie said. They stood at their kitchen counter, Patti chewing on a strip of leftover take-out sushi, regarding the pile of library books. She wrinkled her nose.

  “They smell as if nobody has ever taken them out before.”

  “The pages on this one aren’t even cut,” Charlie said. His voice was pleased. He touched the top book on the pile. Thomas Aquinas, Duns Scotus, Francisco Sanchez, Nicolas Malebranche, George Berkeley. Patti sighed.

  “Are you really going to read all this philosophy?”

  “I certainly am!”

  “Why?”

  “I need to.”

  “ ‘Need to’ ? Charlie, a good well-written detective novel has more to offer.”

  “More what?” Charlie said. She didn’t answer right away, and Charlie felt a sudden, secret flush of confidence that let him say, “There’s a strangeness underlying the universe, Patti. We don’t pay enough attention to it!”

  Patti stopped chewing. Old resentment rose in her eyes. She said quietly, “I do. I pay attention to what underlies the universe every day of my working life. It’s you that’s never paid much attention, no matter how important I said it was to me.”

  “I don’t mean subatomic particles,” Charlie said, more impatiently than he intended. Something about the way she looked had begun to scare him again.

  “That’s what there is.”

  “No,” Charlie said. Patti put down her sushi and turned away. Charlie felt a sudden flood of anger, of tenderness, of manic scorn. She didn’t understand. She thought the whole world could be verified by equations, reduced to electrons and neutrinos. She thought. . . she only thought. She hadn’t choked on a piece of broccoli and been rescued by an ambulance crash, she hadn’t been caught in the improbability of a falling brick and witnessed the greater improbability of a dead pigeon, she hadn’t glimpsed the underlying strange . . . whatever the hell it was.

  “Just remember,” Patti said suddenly, viciously, “you work in advertising.”

  Charlie gaped at her. Even Patti seemed abashed by the spiteful energy of this attack. She put on her most remote and polished expression, the one with which she addressed scientific colloquies, and stared at him. Charlie felt a tingling up and down his spine; in some way he didn’t understand, he had won. He was free of the rein of her scientific judiciousness; she had freed him herself, by the petty nastiness of her words. No one for whom the probabilities of the world had bent—twice—could be touched by something so small. What had happened to him was too powerful, too rich, too important.

  He smiled at her with pity.

  The books, however, were a disaster. In Berkeley’s Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge, Charlie read:

  It may perhaps be objected that if extension and figure exist only in the mind, it follow
s that mind is extended and figured; since extension is a mode or attribute which is predicated of the subject in which it exists. I answer those qualities are in the mind only as they are perceived by it—that is, not by way of mode or attribute, but only by way of idea.

  Charlie read this twice, three times. He read it after a shower to refresh his mind. He read it after a good night’s sleep; after a gin-and-tonic; after a brisk walk. After he had read it for the eleventh time, on a Wednesday evening, Charlie packed up all the books and walked them back to the library.

  He slid Berkeley and Duns Scotus into the after-hours book dump with the same sense of rich freedom with which he had faced Patti. The books didn’t know. Dry words, intellectual gymnastics, earnest and desperate superiority of just exactly the same type as the broccoli-shaped symbols in Patti’s notebook. Just exactly. He was already beyond that. He knew. Charlie closed the metal flap on the book dump and began to whistle Beethoven. The night was cold, the sky sullen; Charlie didn’t notice. He walked home in his T-shirt, gooseflesh and Beethoven’s Fifth. When a Buick coming around the corner at Canal Street, right after the movie let out, missed him by five inches, he stopped and stared at it with eyes wider than those of the terrified teenage girl driving without the permission of either her father or the state of New York.

  “Did I hurt you? Oh, God, did I hurt you?”

  Charlie grinned at her. He couldn’t stop grinning. She was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen in his life, long blond hair and tender skin, black leather jacket and obscene T-shirt. “You didn’t hurt me.”

  “Are you sure? I didn’t even see you! I just came around the corner and—if you’re okay?”

  “I’m fine,” Charlie said. “I’m wonderful. I’m glad it happened.”

  The girl stared at him. Her friend in the car, less spectacular except for four pairs of rhinestone earrings dangling from her ears, rolled down the window to listen.