by Marge Piercy
“In fact, you make me think of Professor Everett Silvester,” she said to Eric Severeid, and shut the sound off. Eric made fish faces in the TV and she grinned, wiping up her eggs and the remains of the beans with a shoe of bread. Eric had been calling down labor unions, about how they were greedy. Everett Silvester had been fond of calling down the world, one item at a time. A fight was creeping through her wall from the next apartment, a fight in Spanish about money. Even though an oil company ad featuring an oceanful of singing fish was on now, she turned the sound back up. Finally she spread out her Daily News and skimmed it.
GIRL SHOOTS M.D.
IN L.A. LOVE SPAT
She smiled, tucking her small chin into her palm. She saw herself marching into Everett’s Riverside Drive apartment and pulling out of a ratty shopping bag a Saturday Night Special. Mamá, how scared he would be; he would shit in his pants with terror. Would the newspapermen ask her to sit on a table showing her legs? It would be sordid but not unsatisfying, to pump at leisure and with careful and by no means wasteful aim several bullets into Professor Everett Silvester of the Romance Languages Department of CUNY, who liked to have a Spanish-speaking secretary, that is, a new one every year—dismissed when he went away for summer vacation. He called them all Chiquita, like bananas. So many years had run over her since then, he might not recognize her, he might confuse her with some other year’s hot Latin secretary. The anger of the weak never goes away, Professor, it just gets a little moldy. It molds like a beautiful blue cheese in the dark, growing stronger and more interesting. The poor and the weak die with all their anger intact and probably those angers go on growing in the dark of the grave like the hair and the nails.
Ah, she should be thinking about Dolly. Dolly must leave Geraldo; and do what for money? To try to get money out of Luis was squeezing orange juice from a paper clip … . Dolly and she would live together. This place was small here for all of them, but it would get Dolly away from Geraldo and then they could look for another apartment together. Money. How to get money? She would wake again in a house with children. She would help Dolly through the pregnancy and cook and clean and rub her back. But would Dolly trust her? Leaving a child-abuser with your little ones—for shame! That’s how Luis would make her feel. Carmel would flop back and forth, a little jealous, a little relieved. Carmel worked in a beauty parlor and always her hair was some new neon color and crimped into curls resembling the colored excelsior that used to come in Easter baskets, but she stood on her feet in a blast of hot air for ten hours a day, evenings too, just getting by. Little enough she got from Luis, because she had truly loved him but had not been able to get him to marry her legally. She had been his common-law wife, a consensual marriage the whole family had viewed as a perfectly good marriage until the lawyers of Shirley’s family had proved that it never existed.
Her father, Jesús, had brought them Easter baskets one year when Connie was ten, little baskets from the dime store full of shredded cellophane and jelly beans and a chocolate bunny wrapped in foil. Tonight she could use something sweet, a chocolate bunny, even a purple jelly bean. She lit her after-supper cigarette and flicked the channels all around. Nothing. Coughing from deep in her chest, she flipped the pages of the rumpled paper, looking for something to touch her mind.
She felt so lonely, so aware of being alone this Friday night with spring percolating through the tenements that when she had smoked the cigarette down to the filter she laid her face on her crooked elbow and shut her eyes. Smell of newsprint. He had asked her to think of him. Who knew what he wanted? To kill her and then it would be over and done. She shut her eyes and tried to think of nothing as debris of the day flickered past. Dolly’s face frowning with worry. Then she saw that Indio face. She did not care. Passive. Receptive. Here she was, abandoning herself to the stronger will of one more male. Letting herself be used, this time not even for something simple like sex or food or comfort but for something murky. It could only be bad. Yet she found herself concentrating on that face, waiting.
Maybe a life could become threadbare enough so that even disaster beckoned, just so it wore a different face than the usual grimace of trouble. “So come, Luciente. See, this time you can come without me being asleep or stoned.” She was going crazy a new way. After all, she no longer had a baby daughter to punish for being hers.
Still, she jerked as a tentative hand tapped her shoulder. “Thank you, Connie. Much easier this way.”
“Easier for what? To rob me? To kill me?” She sat up, shaking back her hair.
Luciente took the chair where Mrs. Polcari always sat. “Please, you embarrass me. I don’t understand what I do that scares you. Tell me how to make you less … anxious.”
“How? That’s easy. What do you want? How do you get in here?”
“Obviously this laying a tablecloth over the compost is doing no good. Try to believe me—I say this, knowing you won’t.” Luciente laughed like a kid, showing strong ivory teeth. “I’m not from your time.”
“Sure, you’re from Mars and you came in a big green saucer. I read about it in the Enquirer.”
“No, no! I’m from a village in Massachusetts—Mattapoisett. Only I live there in 2137.”
Connie snorted. She tossed her hair back. “And you came flying to me in your time machine.”
“I knew it was going to be like this!” Luciente shrugged, throwing up his hands. Tonight he was wearing a ring of blue stone he played with, turning it round and round as he spoke. “Actually … I’m not here.”
“You’re telling me?”
“We are in contact. You are not hallucinating. Whether anyone else can see me, I’m not sure. Frankly, this … contact is experimental. It’s even, grasp, potentially dangerous—to us, I mean. Please don’t get frightened again. You’re happier being sarcastic.”
“Let me get this straight. You’re from the future, and naturally you picked me to visit rather than the President of the United States because I’m such an important and wonderful person.”
“Fasure we wouldn’t pick that person because of political reasons, as I understand the history of your time. Anyone in the hierarchy that made decisions? The Establishment, you called it? I know that, although I’m not a student of your history. Actually I’m a plant geneticist.”
“Staining cells!” Connie pointed at his hands. In her freshman year she had had a biology course.
“I’m working on a strain of zucchini resistant to a mutant form of borer that can penetrate the fairly heavy stalks bred fifteen years ago.”
“You’re a college graduate?” Maybe he wouldn’t beat or rob her. Just genteel slavery, like Professor Silvester.
“What’s that?”
They stared at each other in mutual confusion. “Where you go to study. To get a degree,” Connie snapped.
“A degree of heat? No … as a hierarchial society, you have degrees of rank? Like lords and counts?” Luciente looked miserable. “Study I understand. Myself, I studied with Rose of Ithaca!” He paused for her appreciation, then shrugged, a little crestfallen. “Of course the name means nothing to you.”
“Okay, where do you go to study? A college. What do they give you if you happen to finish? A degree.” Connie lit a cigarette.
Luciente leaped up and backed away. “I know what that is! I beg you, put it out. It’s poisonous, don’t you know that?”
Dumbfounded, she stared at him. He seemed terrified, as if she held a bomb, and indeed his hand was fumbling behind him at the locks on the door. Bemused, she stubbed the cigarette out, and after the smoke had cleared, cautiously he approached the table fanning wildly. “We study with any person who can teach us. We start out learning in our own village, of course. But after naming, we go wherever we must to learn, although only up to the number a teacher can handle. I waited two years for Rose to take me. Where you go depends on what you want to study. For instance, if I were drawn to ocean farming I’d have gone to Gardiners Island or Woods Hole. Although I live near the sea,
I’m a land-plant person.” Luciente clapped his hands to his cheeks. “Blathering about myself! I distract. There must be someplace to begin, if I could blunder on it. Well, at least you’re no longer scared of me.”
“So you want some cola? Or some coffee maybe? I have no wine. I have no beer. Unless soda scares you too?”
“Nothing, thank you. I ate before I came.” Then he grinned sheepishly, touching her hand. “Besides, I confess I am afraid to eat here. It’s not true, is it, the horror stories in our histories? That your food was full of poisonous chemicals, nitrites, hormone residues, DDT, hydrocarbons, sodium benzoate—that you ate food saturated with preservatives?”
“Some people—like me when I have any money—are good cooks! I could cook you a meal that would make you beg for seconds.”
“I don’t mean to hurt your feelings, Connie. I’m sure many of the tales we hear are gross exaggerations. Such as the idea that you—you plural—put your shit into the drinking water.”
“I never heard such nonsense!” Connie flounced up and turned on the faucet of the sink. “That’s drinking water.” Then she hauled him up by the arm and marched him into the hall. He hung back skittishly until she said, “There’s no one.” Then he scuttled behind her nervously as she opened the door and showed him the toilet. She wished it were cleaner. She felt a little embarrassed. The other people who used it never cleaned it, and she cursed as she cleaned for all of them once a week. She flushed the toilet, pulling the chain for demonstration. “See? It goes down and is flushed away.” Following him back to her apartment and routinely locking the door with the bolt, the Yale lock, the police lock with its metal rod that fit into the floor, she sucked her lip with satisfaction. For the first time she had scored a point. Then she realized her reaction made sense only if she was such a naïve idiot as to believe his fairy tale.
“So that’s a water closet!” Luciente rubbed his scalp, setting his long thick black hair flying. “I can’t believe it! So it’s all true.”
“What’s true? The water comes out of the faucet in the sink. Then you use the toilet and the waste goes away.”
“The garbage? Where does the food waste go?”
“I put it downstairs in cans. Believe me, some people around here just throw it out the window. But why foul your own nest? I could see carrying it downtown and putting it by City Hall, to teach them to improve the garbage pickup. In white neighborhoods, you better believe it, they don’t drown in their garbage. In the summer, how it stinks! There in the white apartments, they have a super who picks up the garbage in the hall. Or else they have a dumbwaiter—that’s a little elevator—and the garbage goes down to the basement, where the super unloads it.”
“The super is the name of the task? The person who does the job of returning the garbage to the earth?”
“He puts it in cans in the street and the city comes and takes it away.”
“And what does the city do with it?”
“They burn it.”
“It’s all true!” Luciente shouted with amazement. More gently he added, “Sometimes I suspect our history is infected with propaganda. Many of my generation and even more of Jackrabbit’s suspect the Age of Greed and Waste to be … crudely overdrawn. But to burn your compost! To pour your shit into the waters others downstream must drink! That fish must live in! Into rivers whose estuaries and marshes are links in the whole offshore food chain! Wait till I tell Bee and Jackrabbit! Nobody’s going to believe this. It all goes to show you can be too smart to see the middle step and fall on your face leaping!”
“All right, smart ass. What do you do with garbage and shit? Send it to the moon?”
“We sent it to the earth. We compost everything compostible. We reuse everything else.”
She frowned. Oh, he had to be putting her on. “Are you talking about … outhouses?”
“Out houses? Houses isolated from others?” Luciente made a despairing face. “We aren’t supposed to bombard you with technology, but this is more than I redded.” He raised his wrist-watch to his ear to see if it was ticking, his lips moving.
“I mean how it used to be at my Tío Manuel’s in Texas, for instance. They were too dirt poor to have inside plumbing. They had an outhouse. Flies crawling all over. You sit on a board with a hole in it and it goes down in the ground.”
“That’s the idea in very primitive—I mean rudimentary form. Of course now—I mean in our time—it’s composted centrally for groups of houses, and once it is safe, used in farming.”
“You’re trying to tell me you come from the future? Listen, in fifty years they’ll take their food in pellets and nobody will shit at all!”
“That was tried out late in your century—petrochemical foods. Whopping disaster. Think how people in your time suffered from switching to an overrefined diet—cancer of the colon—”
Connie giggled. “You get so serious when you talk about food and shit, you remind me of Shirley—my brother Luis’s second wife. She’s an Adelle Davis nut.”
Luciente shook his head sadly, his expressive dark eyes liquid with sorrow. “I was redded for this, but I can’t find the door to what you’re meaning half the time.” He combed his fingers back through his thick hair. “I worked sixmonth with nine other strong senders. Fasure we’re a mixed dish. A breeder of turkeys, an embryo tester, a shelf diver, a flight dealer, a ritual maker, a minder, a telemetrist, a shield grower and a student of blue whales. Youngest eighteen and oldest sixty-two. From James Bay to Poughkeepsie, our entire region. We’re called the Manhattan Project—that’s a joke based on a group—”
“I know what the Manhattan Project did,” Connie said with cold dignity. “What are you fixing to blow up? Just everything?”
“It’s a rib, you see, because that was a turning point when technology became itself a threat … . Cause we’re a mobilizing of inknowing resources—mental? We’re the first time travelers fasure—not that I’m actually traveling anyplace!”
“Like the bird that flies in narrowing circles until it goes up its own asshole.”
“We have that rib too.” Luciente beamed. “We must not chill each other. If you’re patient in spite of my bumping along, we’ll succeed in interseeing and comprehending each other. Alia—that’s the student of blue whales—told me that after months with them, Alia can only inknow the grossest emotions or messages. Those long epic operas that are their primary pastime are still garble to per. After a whole generation of com municating with the Yif, we are merely transmitting digital code. We think of the Yif as superrational, a world of mathematicians—and maybe that’s how they vision us … . Anyhow, if you and I suck patience, can we fail to clear our contact? We have only been at this a few weeks, and look how strong and clear we are talking. If we both work at it, we should hear better and better!”
“Work at it!” Connie chuckled, remembering Professor Everett Silvester in bed, working at sex. Her body was a problem he was solving. He put everything in pass-fail terms. “You’re crazy, you know that? If I’m not.”
“Crazy? No, actually I’ve never been able to. Jackrabbit went mad at thirteen and again at fifteen—”
“Who’s this Jackrabbit?”
“I am sweet friends with Jackrabbit. Also Bee. Both are my mems too—in my family? If we work at this, I hope you’ll meet them soon. Even though you laugh at me for speaking of it so. My own work is velvet for me. And this too fascinates.” Luciente took her hands and squeezed them.
“Second best to blue whales and the Yif—whatever they are!”
“Not to me, truly,” Luciente assured her, nodding vigorously. “I see you as a being with many sores, wounds, undischarged anger but basically good and wide open to others.”
“Ha! You know I’m a two-time loser?” Connie yanked her hands free.
“Encyclopedia: define two-time loser.” This time she saw that what she had taken for a watch on Luciente’s wrist was not only that, or not that at all. He was not lifting it to his ear to hear it tick b
ut because it spoke almost inaudibly.
“What’s that?”
“My kenner. Computer link? Actually it’s a computer as well, my own memory annex. I don’t quite follow what you mean, but I myself have done things I regret. Things that injured others. I have messed up experiments—”
“Messing up is something I’m an expert on!”
Someone banged on the door. Luciente sprang to his feet, glancing around.
“Who is it?” Connie yelled.
“It’s me—Dolly! Let me in! Hurry!”
Luciente kissed her on the cheek before she could duck and ran long-legged into the bedroom, saying hastily over his slender shoulder, “Till when! Graze me when you’re free.”
She stood a moment collecting herself. Dolly was banging on the door and screaming. It was a funny time for her to arrive, on a Friday night, when she always had to be working. As Connie released the police lock, she felt the sensation of Luciente’s presence evaporating. She shook her head like a dog coming out of the water. Once Eddie had remained stoned for twenty-four hours on some strongly righteous grass … .
Dolly rushed in past her, blood running from her bruised mouth.
THREE
Locked into seclusion, Connie sat on the floor near the leaky radiator with her knees drawn up to her chest, slowly coming out of a huge dose of drugs. Weak through her whole useless watery body, she still felt nauseated, her head ached, her eyes and throat were sandpapery, her tongue felt swollen in her dry mouth, but at least she could think now. Her brain no longer felt crushed to a lump at the back of her skull and the slow cold weight of time had begun to slide forward.
Already her lips were split, her skin chapped from the tranquilizers, her bowels were stone, her hands shook. She no longer coughed, though. The tranks seemed to suppress the chronic cough that brought up bloody phlegm. Arriving had been so hard, so bleak. The first time here, she had been scared of the other patients—violent, crazy, out-of-control animals. She had learned. It was the staff she must watch out for. But the hopelessness of being stuck here again had boiled up in her two mornings before when the patients in her ward had been lined up for their dose of liquid Thorazine, and she had refused. Pills she could flush away, but the liquid there was no avoiding, and it killed her by inches. She had blindly fought till they had sunk a hypo in her and sent her crashing down.