Fictions

by Nancy Kress

  Eventually the sociologists remembered older models of deprivation and discrimination and isolation from the larger culture: Jewish shtetls. French Huguenots. Amish farmers. Self-sufficient models, stagnant but uncollapsed. And while they were remembering, we held goods lotteries, and took on apprentices, and rationed depository food according to who needed it, and replaced our broken-down furniture with other broken-down furniture, and got married and bore children. We paid no taxes, fought no wars, wielded no votes, provided no drama. After a while—a long while—the visitors stopped coming. Even the sociologists.

  But here stands this young man, without a sani-suit, smiling from brown eyes under thick dark hair and taking my hand. He doesn’t wince when he touches the ropes of disease. Nor does he appear to be cataloguing the kitchen furniture for later recording: three chairs, one donated imitation Queen Anne and one Inside genuine Joe Kleinschmidt; the table; the wood stove; the sparkling new Oriental lacquered cupboard; plastic sink with hand pump connected to the reservoir pipe from Outside; woodbox with donated wood stamped “Gift of Boise-Cascade”; two eager and intelligent and loving young girls he had better not try to patronize as diseased freaks. It has been a long time, but I remember.

  “Hello, Mrs. Pratt. I’m Tom McHabe. Thank you for agreeing to talk to me.”

  I nod. “What are we going to talk about, Mr. McHabe? Are you a journalist?”

  “No. I’m a doctor.”

  I didn’t expect that. Nor do I expect the sudden strain that flashes across his face before it’s lost in another smile. Although it is natural enough that strain should be there: Having come Inside, of course, he can never leave. I wonder where he picked up the disease. No other new cases have been admitted to our colony for as long as I could remember. Had they been taken, for some Outside political reason, to one of the other colonies instead?

  McHabe says, “I don’t have the disease, Mrs. Pratt.”

  “Then why on earth—”

  “I’m writing a paper on the progress of the disease in long-established colony residents. I have to do that from Inside, of course,” he says, and immediately I know he is lying. Rachel and Jennie, of course, do not. They sit one on each side of him like eager birds, listening.

  “And how will you get this paper out once it’s written?” I said. “Short-wave radio. Colleagues are expecting it,” but he doesn’t quite meet my eyes.

  “And this paper is worth permanent internment?”

  “How rapidly did your case of the disease progress?” he says, not answering my question. He looks at my face and hands and forearms, an objective and professional scrutiny that makes me decide at least one part of his story is true. He is a doctor.

  “Any pain in the infected areas?”

  “None.”

  “Any functional disability or decreased activity as a result of the disease?” Rachel and Jennie look slightly puzzled; he’s testing me to see if I understand the terminology.

  “None.”

  “Any change in appearance over the last few years in the first skin areas to be affected? Changes in colour or tissue density or size of the thickened ridges?”

  “None.”

  “Any other kinds of changes I haven’t thought to mention?”

  “None.”

  He nods and rocks back on his heels. He’s cool, for someone who is going to develop non-dysfunctional ropes of disease himself. I wait to see if he’s going to tell me why he’s really here. The silence lengthens. Finally McHabe says, “You were a CPA,” at the same time that Rachel says, “Anyone want a glass of ‘ade?”

  McHabe accepts gladly. The two girls, relieved to be in motion, busy themselves pumping cold water, crushing canned peaches, mixing the ‘ade in a brown plastic pitcher with a deep wart on one side where it once touched the hot stove.

  “Yes,” I say to McHabe, “I was a CPA. What about it?”

  “They’re outlawed now.”

  “CPAs? Why? Staunch pillars of the establishment,” I say, and realize how long it’s been since I used words like that. They taste metallic, like old tin.

  “Not anymore. IRS does all tax computations and sends every household a customized bill. The calculations on how they reach your particular customized figure is classified. To prevent foreign enemies from guessing at revenue available for defense.”

  “Ah.”

  “My uncle was a CPA.”

  “What is he now?”

  “Not a CPA,” McHabe says. He doesn’t smile. Jennie hands glasses of ‘ade to me and then to McHabe, and then he does smile. Jennie drops her lashes and a little colour steals into her cheeks. Something moves behind McHabe’s eyes. But it’s not like Peter; not at all like Peter.

  I glance at Rachel. She doesn’t seem to have noticed anything. She isn’t jealous, or worried, or hurt. I relax a little.

  McHabe says to me. “You also Published that artical.”

  “How do you happen to know that?”

  Again he doesn’t answer me. “It’s an unusual combination of abilities, accounting and history writing.”

  “I suppose so,” I say, without interest. It was so long ago. Rachel says to McHabe, “Can I ask you something?”

  “Sure.”

  “Outside, do you have medicines that will cure wood of termites?”

  Her face is deadly serious. McHabe doesn’t grin, and I admit—reluctantly—that he is likable. He answers her courteously. “We don’t cure the wood, we do away with the termites. The best way is to build with wood saturated with creosote, a chemical they don’t like, so that they don’t get into the wood in the first place. But there must be chemicals that will kill them after they’re already there. I’ll ask around and try to bring you something on my next trip Inside.”

  His next trip Inside. He drops this bombshell as if easy passage In and Out were a given. Rachel’s and Jennie’s eyes grow wide; they both look at me. McHabe does, too, and I see that his look is a cool scrutiny, an appraisal of my reaction. He expects me to ask for details, or maybe even—it’s been a long time since I thought in these terms, and it’s an effort—to become angry at him for lying. But I don’t know whether or not he’s lying, and at any rate, what does it matter? A few people from Outside coming into the colony—how could it affect us? There won’t be large immigration, and no emigration at all.

  I say quietly, “Why are you really here, Dr. McHabe?”

  “I told you, Mrs. Pratt. To measure the progress of the disease.” I say nothing. He adds, “Maybe you’d like to hear more about how it is now Outside.”

  “Not especially.”

  “Why not?”

  I shrug. “They leave us alone.”

  He weighs me with his eyes. Jennie says timidly, “I’d like to hear more about Outside.” Before Rachel can add “Me, too,” the door flings violently open and Mamie backs into the room, screaming into the hall behind her.

  “And don’t ever come back! If you think I’d ever let you touch me again after screwing that . . . that . . . I hope she’s got a diseased twat and you get it on your—” She sees McHabe and breaks off, her whole body jerking in rage. A soft answer from the hall, the words unintelligible from my chair by the fire, makes her gasp and turn even redder. She slams the door, bursts into tears, and runs into her bedroom, slamming that door as well.

  Rachel stands up. “Let me, honey,” I say, but before I can rise—my arthritis is much better—Rachel disappears into her mother’s room. The kitchen rings with embarrassed silence.

  Tom McHabe rises to leave. “Sit down, Doctor,” I say, hoping, I think, that if he remains Mamie will restrain her hysterics—maybe—and Rachel will emerge sooner from her mother’s room.

  McHabe looks undecided. Then Jennie says, “Yes, please stay. And would you tell us—” I see her awkwardness, her desire to not sound stupid “—about how people do Outside?”

  He does. Looking at Jennie but meaning me, he talks about the latest version of martial law, about the failure of the National Guard
to control protestors against the South American war until they actually reached the edge of the White House electro-wired zone; about the growing power of the Fundamentalist underground that the other undergrounds—he uses the plural—call “the God gang.” He tells us about the industries losing out steadily to Korean and Chinese competitors, the leaping unemployment rate, the ethnic backlash, the cities in flames. Miami. New York. Los Angeles—these had been rioting for years. Now it’s Portland, St. Louis, Atlanta, Phoenix. Grand Rapids burning. It’s hard to picture.

  I say, “As far as I can tell, donations to our repositories haven’t fallen off.”

  He looks at me again with that shrewd scrutiny, weighing something I can’t see, then touches the edge of the stove with one boot. The boot, I notice, is almost as old and scarred as one of ours. “Korean-made stove. They make nearly all the donations now. Public relations. Even a lot of martial-law Congressmen had relatives interred, although they won’t admit it now. The Asians cut deals warding off complete protectionism, although of course your donations are only a small part of that. But just about everything you get Inside is Chink or Splat.” He uses the words casually, this courteous young man giving me the news from such a liberal slant, and that tells me more about the Outside than all his bulletins and summaries.

  Jennie says haltingly, “I saw . . . I think it was an Asian man. Yesterday.”

  “Where?” I say sharply. Very few Asian Americans contract the disease; something else no one understands. There are none in our colony.

  “At the Rim. One of the guards. Two other men were kicking him and yelling names at him—we couldn’t hear too clearly over the intercom boxes.”

  “We? You and Rachel? What were you two doing at the Rim?” I say, and heard my own tone. The Rim, a wide empty strip of land, is electro-mined and barbwired to keep us communicables Inside. The Rim is surrounded by miles of defoliated and disinfected land, poisoned by preventive chemicals, but even so it’s patrolled by unwilling soldiers who communicate with the Inside by intercoms set up every half-mile on both sides of the barbed wire. When the colony used to have a fight or a rape or—once, in the early years—a murder, it happened on the Rim. When the hateful and the hating came to hurt us because before the elecro-wiring and barbed wire we were easy targets and no police would follow them Inside, the soldiers, and sometimes our men as well, stopped them at the Rim. Our dead are buried near the Rim. And Rachel and Jennie, dear gods, at the Rim . . .

  “We went to ask the guards over the intercom boxes if they knew how to stop termites,” Jennie says logically. “After all, their work is to stop things, germs and things. We thought they might be able to tell us how to stop termites. We thought they might have special training in it.”

  The bedroom door opens and Rachel comes out. her young face drawn. McHabe smiles at her. and then his gaze returns to Jennie. “I don’t think soldiers are trained in stopping termites, but I’ll definitely bring you something to do that the next time I come Inside.”

  There it is again. But all Rachel says is, “Oh. good. I asked around for more drywall today, but even if I get some, the same thing will happen again if we don’t get something to stop them.” McHabe says, “Did you know that termites elect a queen? Closely-monitored balloting system. Fact.”

  Rachel smiles, although I don’t think she really understands.

  “And ants can bring down a rubber tree plant.” He begins to sing, an old song from my childhood. “High Hopes.” Frank Sinatra on the stereo—before CDs. even, before a lot of things—iced tea and Coke in tall glasses on a Sunday afternoon, aunts and uncles sitting around the kitchen, football on television in the living room beside a table with a lead-crystal vase of the last purple chrysanthemums from the garden. The smell of late Sunday afternoon, tangy but a little thin, the last of the weekend before the big yellow school bus labored by on Monday morning.

  Jennnie and Rachel, of course, see none of this. They hear light-hearted words in a good baritone and a simple rhythm they can follow, hope and courage in silly doggerel. They are delighted. They join in the chorus after McHabe has sung it a few times, then sing him three songs popular at Block dances, then make him more ‘ade. then begin to ask questions about the Outside. Simple questions: What do people eat? Where do they get it? What do they wear? The three of them are still at it when I go to bed. my arthritis finally starting to ache, glancing at Mamie’s closed door with a sadness I hadn’t expected and can’t name.

  “That son-of-a-bitch better never come near me again.” Mamie says the next morning. The day is sunny and I sit by our one window, knitting a blanket to loosen my fingers, wondering if the donated wool came from Chinese or Korean sheep. Rachel has gone with Jennie on a labor call to deepen a well in Block E: people had been talking about doing that for weeks, and apparently someone finally got around to organizing it. Mamie slumps at the table, her eyes red from crying. “I caught him screwing Mary Delbarton.” Her voice splinters like a two-year-old’s. “Mama—he was screwing Mary Delbarton.”

  “Let him go. Mamie.”

  “I’d be alone again.” She says it with a certain dignity, which doesn’t last. “That son-of-a-bitch goes off with that slut one day after we’re engaged and I’m fucking alone again!”

  I don’t say anything; there isn’t anything to say. Mamie’s husband died eleven years ago, when Rachel was only five, of an experimental cure being tested by government doctors. The colonies were guinea pigs. Seventeen people in four colonies died, and the government discontinued funding and made it a crime for anyone to go in and out of a disease colony. Too great a risk of contamination, they said. For the protection of the citizens of the country.

  “He’ll never touch me again!” Mamie says, tears on her lashes. One slips down an inch until it hits the first of the disease ropes, then travels sideways towards her mouth. I reach over and wipe it away. “Goddamn fucking son-of-a-bitch!”

  By evening, she and Peter are holding hands. They sit side by side, and his fingers creep up her thigh under what they think is the cover of the table. Mamie slips her hand under his buttocks. Rachel and Jennie look away, Jennie flushing slightly. I have a brief flash of memory, of the kind I haven’t had for years: myself at eighteen or so, my first year at Yale, in a huge brass bed with a modern geometric-print bedspread and a red-headed man I met three hours ago. But here. Inside . . . here sex, like everything else, moves so much more slowly, so much more carefully, so much more privately. For such a long time people were afraid that this disease, like that other earlier one, might be transmitted sexually. And then there was the shame of one’s ugly body, crisscrossed with ropes of disease . . . I’m not sure that Rachel has ever seen a man naked.

  I say, for the sake of saying something, “So there’s a Block dance Wednesday.”

  “Block B,” Jennie says. Her blue eyes sparkle. “With the band that played last summer for Block E.”

  “Guitars?”

  “Oh, no! They’ve got a trumpet and a violin,” Rachel says, clearly impressed. “You should hear how they sound together. Gram—it’s a lot different than guitars. Come to the dance!”

  “I don’t think so, honey. Is Dr. McHabe going?” From both their faces I know this guess is right.

  Jennie says hesitantly, “He wants to talk to you first, before the dance, for a few minutes. If that’s all right.”

  “Why?”

  “I’m not . . . not exactly sure I know all of it.” She doesn’t meet my eyes: unwilling to tell me, unwilling to lie. Most of the children Inside, I realize for the first time, are not liars. Or else they’re bad ones. They’re good at privacy, but it must be an honest privacy.

  “Will you see him?” Rachel says eagerly.

  “I’ll see him.”

  Mamie looks away from Peter long enough to add sharply, “If it’s anything about you or Jennie, he should see me, miss, not your grandmother. I’m your mother and Jennie’s guardian, and don’t you forget it.”

  “No, Mama.�
� Rachel says.

  “I don’t like your tone, miss!”

  “Sorry,” Rachel says, in the same tone. Jennie drops her eyes, embarrassed. But before Mamie can get really started on indignant maternal neglect, Peter whispers something in her ear and she claps her hand over her mouth, giggling.

  Later, when just the two of us are left in the kitchen, I say quietly to Rachel. “Try not to upset your mother, honey. She can’t help it.”

  “Yes, Gram,” Rachel says obediently. But I hear the disbelief in her tone, a disbelief muted by her love for me and even for her mother, but nonetheless there. Rachel doesn’t believe that Mamie can’t help it. Rachel, born Inside, can’t possibly help her own ignorance of what it is that Mamie thinks she has lost.

  On his second visit to me six days later, just before the Block dance, Tom McHabe seems different. I’d forgotten that there are people who radiate such energy and purpose that they seem to set the very air tingling. He stands with his legs braced slightly apart, flanked by Rachel and Jennie, both dressed in their other skirts for the dance. Jennie has woven a red ribbon through her blonde curls; it glows like a flower. McHabe touches her lightly on the shoulder, and I realize from her answering look what must be happening between them. My throat tightens.

  “I want to be honest with you. Mrs. Pratt. I’ve talked to Jack Stevenson and Mary Kramer, as well as some others in Blocks C and E, and I’ve gotten a feel for how you live here. A little bit, anyway. I’m going to tell Mr. Stevenson and Mrs. Kramer what I tell you. but I wanted you to be first.”

  “Why?” I say, more harshly than I intend. Or think I intend.