Beauty

by Sheri S. Tepper

  “Down, down,” the woman crooned, “down, to happyland.”

  I asked the child to come away with me, and after a while she did. Her name was Elaine. She had a lovely laugh. I asked her what year she had been born, and she said 2108. She couldn’t remember what year it had been when she got in the tiny machine, but she looked about six to me, which would make it about 2114. We stayed in the corridor, playing ball, playing hide-and-seek.

  The last time she hid, I could not find her. Finally, I went back to their cubicle to see if she had gone there, and she had. She was lying beside her mother on the bed. Her mother’s hand was still upon the knife, wet with Elaine’s quiet blood. Deathwords came from the woman’s mouth, a terrible singing, “Down … down … down … to happyland.”

  I screamed, stood there screaming, screaming until it hurt. The people who manage the shelter came and took the woman away. They wrapped up the little girl’s body in black stuff and took it away. Someone gave me a white pill and a glass of water. They said the woman was mad. That she should have been locked up long ago.

  I did not tell them that the woman had been locked up, locked up all her life; that in the time she had come from, everyone was locked up forever.

  August 12, 1991

  Bill brought back a set of his documentaries with him to use as examples of his work. He had to claim they are speculative fiction in order to use them in seeking a job, but evidently they’re good examples of his talent, for it didn’t take him long to get a position writing for a television station. Janice got work, too, at a library, and then we three rented a house on the corner of Wisdom Street and Seventh Avenue. It’s a house about the size of the pigpen at Westfaire.

  However, it has flush toilets, which I like, and a garbage disposer. I also like hair dryers and tampons. I do not like telephone salesmen and the way everybody has dogs they let empty themselves just anywhere. In my time commoners didn’t have dogs, they couldn’t have fed dogs, they’d probably have ended up eating the dogs. I don’t like the noise people are allowed to make with radios. It does not sound like music. It sounds savage and makes your ears ring, and afterward it is hard to hear when people speak.

  I have a room of my own, with my own things in it. I put my cloak and the boots and Mama’s box at the back of the closet shelf. Grumpkin sleeps on my bed. I don’t like all the concrete and no trees. I do like hamburgers and french fries and Pepsi, and the kind of chickens they have now with all the meat on them. In the fourteenth, chickens were very skinny and tough. I hate the way the world smells. On balance, I would go back in a minute, but since the boots don’t work, I don’t have that choice, I’m trying to seek the good in the time I’m in.

  From a television show I learned that people like Bill are called transvestites and that Janice is probably frigid (though maybe she’s just a religious fanatic) and Jaybee is probably a psychopath. The aunts would have had a fit if they had ever seen the things they talk about on TV, but I think it’s good to have words for things.

  Everything is all right, except for the dreams I have about the little girl in the shelter. I dream I am with them in the twenty-second. I dream I am trying to find a chute which is not already stuffed full of bodies. I dream I am singing: down, down, down to happyland. And I wake up choking.

  August 15, 1991

  I met a neighbor girl my age. She’s a senior at George Washington High, the school I’ll be going to next month. Her name is Candace Maclear, and everyone calls her Candy. She’s very friendly. She says I’m really rad, which is good, and offered me some coke (to sniff) and spent all day teaching me to fix my hair. She says I talk funny, so I’m concentrating on sounding more like her.

  August 17, 1991

  I told Bill about Candy offering me drugs, and he warned me about it when I go to school in two weeks. Everyone here uses them, he says, and it’s hard not to. He talked about “peer pressure,” which seems to mean letting other people run your life for you. I had enough of that at Westfaire!

  August 20, 1991

  Candy’s brother told me her boyfriend really goes after girls with long hair, and Candy’s afraid he’ll take to me. I’ve seen Candy’s boyfriend and, believe me, she hasn’t anything to worry about. His hair stands up in spikes and he has pimples. I look at him and I think of Giles. I look at all the boys here and I think of Giles. I wonder if they’re all like this!

  August 21, 1991

  Everything here in the twentieth seems very temporary. Nothing lasts. Friendships don’t last. Love affairs don’t last. Marriages don’t last. I’ve seen men here who people tell me have been married four or five times, and their old wives aren’t dead, either. People even change what sex they are, and there are people coming to the door all the time trying to get me to change my religion and be born again, though I haven’t gotten used to being horn the first time yet. Wouldn’t being born again imply I didn’t trust God to have done it right the first time?

  Even though I was mad at him, I wish Father Raymond were here! Janice did get born again, last week, and there’s no living with her, I finally had to tell her I am a Catholic and please leave me alone. She got very angry. She doesn’t approve of me and she doesn’t approve of Bill. She says he’s being sinful to dress up like he does. I can’t see why. He isn’t hurting anyone, but Janice says God intended men to wear trousers and women to wear dresses. I look at pictures of Greeks and Scots and aborigines and Jesus, and I can’t figure out how she knows that!

  September 6, 1991

  Well, I’ve been to school. I know who sells crack and who fucks who and which teachers are gay and who has AIDS. Nobody has asked me to do any arithmetic or geography at all, so that was a waste of time. I am taking classes in literature and biology and Spanish. Bill and Janice decided these were the safest subjects for me.

  Bill took one whole hour to tell me about sexual diseases, and maybe it’s a good thing he did. I do not want any of their diseases, though, after eavesdropping on a table of boys at lunch, I don’t think I’d be tempted anyhow. They were talking about this girl they got drunk or stoned and then they all did it, watching each other. They were laughing at the way different ones had done it, making comments about how long it took this one or that one, like the stable-boys used to hang over the paddock, watching the stallion serve the mares, giggling and pointing. I wonder if that has anything to do with male bonding?

  In the fourteenth, we dreamed of chivalry and courtly love. I remember the oaths of fidelity the young men-at-arms used to offer their ladies, and they were no older than these high school boys. These guys don’t offer anything. It’s like the women they hit on are sacrifices to some kind of god that only boys worship. Most of the boys here remind me of Jaybee, though I’m not sure why.

  The twentieth makes me feel very lonely. This isn’t my place. When I remember how beautiful Westfaire is, was, when I remember Giles, I want to cry. I choke, my chest burns, I get the hiccups and have to he down. The worst part of living here is that nothing is beautiful. There must be something beautiful in the twentieth, and maybe I just haven’t seen it yet, but the way everyone acts, this is all there is. Magic doesn’t work. There is no other way. Some days all I want to do is cry.

  [Some days all I want to do is cry! We keep trying to lure her, and she keeps ignoring us. I have thought of sending Puck. He says he can get there. The problem is, his doing so might draw attention to her. The Dark Lord may be watching the Bogles. We don’t know who he’s watching! Puck’s going there might show up like a meteorite, burning across the night. Israfel keeps saying, “Patience, Carabosse.” Patience! I don’t think he sees the irony of that.]

  October 4, 1991

  Today I think I figured out Fidipur. In social studies class the teacher commented that the recent famines in Africa are only the beginning of what may turn out to be worldwide famines of varying degrees of severity. Then he showed us a film of black people in Africa dying in large numbers and another one about the hole in the Van Allen belts. (Fat
her Raymond would be fascinated!) The teacher explained that very soon the world would warm up and get dryer, that food would be harder to produce, and “We won’ be able to fidipur, ‘cause there’ll be millyuns and millyuns of ‘em.”

  Fidipur! Feed the poor. The way he said it was exactly the way the beggars in the twenty-first had said it. I asked Bill to explain it to me, and he told me about population growth and the Catholic church and acid rain and cutting down the rain forests to grow more food. Everyone argues about it, he said. Economists and businessmen say nothing is going wrong. Ecologists and population experts say the end is coming. While they argue, things keep changing until we get to the point of no return, sometime during the next hundred years. After that, there’ll be no more out-of-doors because every square inch of land will be needed to produce food, and that’s why, in the twenty-first, all the people had to be shut up in great tall, half-buried towers where they couldn’t move around and interfere with Fidipur’s farms.

  I said, sensibly I thought, that God gave man the duty to take care of the world, not a contract to wreck the place, and Bill laughed the way he does, ha, ha, ha.

  The comebacks say everything starts breaking down sometime late in the twenty-first, with Fidipur’s farms playing out and people getting pushed down the chutes a hundred thousand at a time and all the machines breaking down. Elaine may have been the last person who came back, and she came in about 2114.

  Bill says the handwriting is already on the wall, we’re already doomed. Janice says he shouldn’t say “doomed” when so many people will be alive and being fed, so he asked her why she left the twenty-first if it was so great, and she got mad at him. There are tear spots all over this page, and I can’t stop.

  October 7, 1991

  I’ve stopped thinking about Fidipur. You can’t think about things like that all the time. Your body won’t let you. Everytime I started to cry about it, my chest would burn like a bonfire. It got so I was afraid to think about it at all. So, I’m trying to think about other things, about trying out for cheerleader—which seems kind of dumb, but all the good-looking girls do it—and going to football games and things like that. I am trying to do as Father Raymond used to suggest and seek the good. Things wouldn’t be too bad if Janice would just stop talking about religion and let me alone. I wish I could be nicer to her about it, but her religion is so ugly! So mean!

  [We go on transmitting these urgencies, but they have not the volume of the constant music where she is; they cannot be heard above the traffic noises. There are so many distractions in the twentieth, she doesn’t hear us. If she would only decide to be a nun! I think possibly we could get through to a nun.]

  November 15, 1991

  Yesterday we had a special kind of event at school. The event was called “Career Days,” and they had people from all kinds of jobs and professions come speak to us about their jobs. One of the men was our teacher’s brother, an author, Barrymore Gryme, only he told us all to call him Barry. I’ve seen his books in the school library, but I’ve never read one. After the session, when the students were leaving the room, he asked me what my name was. I told him, Dorothy, because that’s the name Bill and Janice and I had decided on, after my old friend Doll. We knew enough to realize I couldn’t call myself Beauty, not in the twentieth.

  “You don’t belong in Kansas, do you?” he asked me with a funny smile.

  I didn’t know what to say, so I just smiled back.

  “No, you’re the Emerald City all over,” he said. Then I knew he was talking about that movie with the singing girl and the straw man. The Yellow Brick Road one. I’d seen that in the twenty-first, about fifteen times.

  “Not that Dorothy,” I explained. “I was named after an old friend.”

  “Where do you live, old friend Dorothy?” he asked me. I didn’t want to be rude, so I told him. When I got home that night, there were flowers for me in the living room, from him. Bill was puzzled, but Janice was furious.

  “What have you been doing when you’re supposed to be at school,” she shouted at me. “What have you been up to?”

  I guess my mouth dropped open, because Bill told her not to yell. When I saw his name on the tag with the flowers, I was just as puzzled as Bill was.

  “I only said about six words to him,” I said. “And there were lots of other people around.”

  “Where, around?” Janice demanded.

  I told her, at Career Day, at school, that he was our teacher’s brother, and after a while she believed it. When I told her his full name, then she was as puzzled as Bill.

  Bill nodded, his mouth pursed up. Then he sat me down at the desk and made me write the man a nice note, saying thank you for the flowers but I’d sent them to a hospital, because I wasn’t allowed to accept gifts from older men. Bill thought it was “appropriate.”

  November 17, 1991

  I told Candy about the flowers I got from Barrymore Gryme. I said I couldn’t understand why he’d do that, and she got bright red in the face and said, “Honestly, Dor, you’re so dumb it’s just unbelievable.” And when I asked her why, she said look in the mirror for crysakes.

  Well, I’ve known for a long time I’m beautiful, but that doesn’t explain anything! He’s too old for me, and I’m sure too young for him. Candy thinks I ought to have an affair with Barry Gryme.

  I told her she was crazy.

  She says just wait. Her aunt told her virginity gets to be more and more of a burden the older you get. She told Candy you get to the point where you don’t decide whether you like someone enough to make love to them or not, you only get to the point of wondering whether they’re good enough to give it up for. “Aunt Becky says you quit wondering when and start wondering if,” Candy said.

  Should I have an affair because of Candy’s aunt?

  [As if Israfel and I did not have enough to worry about already!

  We were standing at the Pool, trying our best to get through to the twentieth, when Israfel remarked that, as our magic weakens, the power of the Dark Lord strengthens. I had known that, of course, though I had not let myself consider it deeply. Our departed brother took terror and pain as his portion. It was always a part of what we did. Magic is a perilous thing, and it has its horrifying aspects, but we have always worked with and around these aspects, not making them the focus of our art The Dark Lord has taken these to the exclusion of all else. He works in pain and prurience, lust and death, ramifying these until they fill his whole canvas. Discontent with his own efforts, he selects minions among men to develop these themes further. Is Jay bee one of these? Is Barrymore Gryme?

  Has this man been set upon her, like a hound set upon a hare? We have been so careful We have done nothing to draw attention to her, letting it seem that she has done everything out of her own motivation, out of her own desires. She has left no magical trail behind, like the slime of a snail, for some inimical creature to follow. Surely, he can’t know?

  So I say to Israfel, and he to me, trying to convince ourselves.]

  November 20, 1991

  I got a Barry Gryme out of the school library and tried to read it. I read two hundred pages, then I had to quit because it scared me to death. Everything in it was hopeless and terrible. People kept being mutilated or eaten or destroyed. It was full of sex, too, but there was no pleasure in it. It was … it was a lot like the horro-porn films in the twenty-first. If lots of people read things like this, there’s something terribly, terribly wrong….

  Christmas Morning 1991

  Bill and Janice are still asleep. If I were home, I’d be in church, watching Father Raymond moving around at the altar, smelling the incense, hearing his voice with the Latin rolling out, seeing the candles flicker. I’m homesick. There’s nothing to do about it, so I’m watching one of Bill’s documentaries.

  Water, gray and cold, with lights in it as bubbles, rising, bright shadows in the water and vast distances, with everything moving and shifting, so there is no up or down. Singing in the water. Deep, org
an tones, one, then two together, then a third. Soft, hurting sounds.

  Bill’s voice, his deep voice, the one he uses when he does the narrations. “These are the last whales, and this is their last song. Though they are unaware of it, this pod of whales is the last of the great sea creatures to swim the seas of earth. Cells have been saved in the hope that some future time will allow their regeneration, though as things stand today such hope seems dim and distant.”

  The organ voices again. Incredibly sad. Jaybee’s camera focuses on an eye set in a great wrinkled socket. The eye looks at me. Oh, there’s knowing there. They know. They know they are the last. All these seas are their tears, they have wept them all. All the oceans of earth are made up of tears. Whale tears, elephant tears, the tears of forests, the tears of flowers, the tears of everything beautiful cried out to make oceans.

  We come up. We fly up through the water, we rip through the surface scattering droplets in all directions, we skim over the waves like a flung spear, toward the farms, skeletons on the horizon, with huge blades rotating, with solar collectors like blinding sheets of white fire.

  “Fidipur’s farms,” says Bill’s voice. “Here, suspended over the deep, are the mighty wind- and sunpowered pumps that bring the cold harvest of the sea to the surface, where it is dried, powdered, and shipped to the great landside factories of Fidipur.”

  Ships going and coming, being loaded and leaving, zipping into the loading docks empty, one after the other, by the hundreds. Like beetles. Like wood beetles. Eating everything, all, until nothing is left.

  Back across the water, down to the whales again, this time slowly, letting us see them. Their bones show through their flesh. Their eyes are deeply sunk. The thin calf nuzzles its mother hopelessly. There is no milk. They are starving. Fidipur has taken it all.