by Marge Piercy
At two the staff emerged, Dr. Redding looking irritated. “This won’t do. We need more. You’ve got to scan more records. We might even locate some subjects on the chronic wards.”
The first consequences of that interview came within the week, when Connie was told to get herself together for a move. “You got lucky, girl. I put in a good word on you. But I know we be seeing you up here again!” Fargo packed her off Ward L-6 to a more open ward, G-2.
Sybil gave her a sad hopeless look that reminded her of childhood partings from best friends. Connie said, “Try to get off here. Be cagey for a while.”
“I’ll be docile as a plastic cow,” Sybil said without conviction. “After all, I’ll never get out of this place if I don’t start trying, unless I learn to fly. And I have a lot to do this year.”
Ward G-2 was in G building, just as old and sad but in marginally better repair. It was a red brick barracks that stood nearer the medical building, where the doctors had interviewed her. Connie sat on her new cot and looked over the ward, trying to gauge its potentials and threats. The long room with the beds had several windows whose sills were claimed as roosting territory by cliques of women, black women on one window and whites on another. G-2 was a locked ward but a more active one. That big door by the nursing station clattered open to admit occupational therapists, an occasional volunteer, and to let out patients who worked off the ward. Group therapy sessions were held on the ward twice a week. Little cabinets stood beside each of the fifty beds, and at one end of the ward card tables were set up. Along one side ran a long screened-in porch where patients could walk. They shared a day room with a men’s ward, a dim room with chairs in rows facing a locked TV. It was strange to see men around again.
As she stood in line for medication, she felt like singing out with joy when she saw the little white cups with the pills inside and the cups of water. No more liquid Thorazine burning her throat hoarse. She bit hard on her cheeks to keep her face immobile. This ward meant less snowing. The line moved so slowly she had time to cover her joy, to crush it into a small corner where she could preserve it intact until she had a chance to examine it in safety. Yes, here her head would be clearer. Not today. She was new on the ward and the nurse watched closely as she took the pill. Afterward she walked slowly through the new ward, slowly as inmates always do. She remembered being horrified by that the first time she had been brought here. The drugs caused it, the heavy doping; but also the lack of anyplace to go and the time, the leaden time, to use up.
Sedately she walked through the sleeping room and into the day room. Here she would get the small exercise of walking, but she must be careful not to make it obvious she was pacing. That was an offense that would go in her record: patient paces ward. Here there was more to do but also here would be informers, spies.
She walked onto the porch. It was chilly, but she did not care. She had caught a glimpse of a coat supply in a closet near the nursing station, which meant at least some patients had grounds privileges. She pressed her face to the rusty screen and stared at the trees just leafing out, the benches, the lawns. She would be real cool, real cooperative. How she wanted to walk on that grass below! Her move down to G-2 must prove to be a small step closer to getting out altogether—closer to the big free open daylight out there.
FIVE
Connie sat on the porch with a towel around her shoulders for warmth. The chilly drizzly June day smelled like a basement under the low gray sky. She was so glad to be outside, even on the porch whose rusted screens gave a sepia wash to the walks and brick buildings, that she did not care if her behind hurt from the chill of the warped floorboards. She felt a keen enjoyment too of being alone for the first time since isolation. No one else had come out in the damp and the cold.
She gloried in breathing outdoor air, in seeing more than four walls, in smelling trees instead of medicine and diarrhea and disinfectant. The gray of the day soothed her. Strong colors would have burned her eyes. Every day was a lesson in how starved the eyes could grow for hue, for reds and golds; how starved the ears could grow for conga drums, for the blare of traffic, for dogs barking, for the baseball games chattering from TVs, for voices talking flatly, conversationally, with rising excitement in Spanish, for children playing in the streets, the Puerto Rican children whose voices sounded faster, harder than Chicano Spanish, as if there were more metal in their throats.
She felt Luciente pressing on her clearly for the first time since they had let her out of seclusion: not those brushes of presence that rose and faded but the solid force of concentration bearing around her. She resisted. To sit on the porch was still new, in a convalescent pleasure like the first time out of bed after a long illness. Still, she felt Luciente pressing on her and it was like, oh, refusing to answer the door to a friend who knew she was at home. How could she think of Luciente as a friend? But she had begun to.
“Me too, in truth,” the voice formed in her mind. “I’ve missed you.”
“Why don’t you take shape? Nobody’s out here but me.”
“Shut your eyes. Let’s go into my space. Today, in my year, the weather is better.”
“Do you control the weather?”
“The sharks did in the 1990s—pass the term. I mean before us. But the results were the usual disasters. It rained for forty days on the Gulf Coast till most of it floated out to sea. Let’s see, the jet stream was forced south from Canada. They close to brought on an ice age. There was five years’ drought in Australia. Plagues of insects … Open your eyes.”
They were standing in Luciente’s hut in sun streaming through the south window, which was open and covered with a fine-mesh screen. “You must still have mosquitoes!”
“They’re part of the food chain. We bred out the irritant … . About weather, when it gets disastrous, sometimes we adjust a little. But every region must agree. When a region is plagued by drought, grasp, we usually prefer to deliver food than to approve a weather shift. Because of the danger. We’re cautious about gross experiments. ‘In biosystems, all factors are not knowable.’ First rule we learn when we study living beings in relation … . You’re looking thin!” Luciente reproved her, leaning close.
“You say that like it was bad. Isn’t thin beautiful to you? I’ve been dumpy for three years. Not that I don’t look as lousy as I feel in that bughouse.”
“Jackrabbit is thin beautiful. Bee is big beautiful. Dawn is small beautiful. Tilia is creamy orange beautiful.” Luciente nodded at her cat, who stood up expectantly. “Tilia told me you’re stupid, and I explained that people of your time did not talk with cats.”
She remembered the orange cat stalking away. It stared at her boldly now, with malice she felt. “People of my time talk to cats, dogs, hamsters. To parakeets and goldfish. Lonely people talk to the wall. Listen, the bughouse is full of women who started talking to the Blessed Virgin Mary because their old man wouldn’t listen.”
“I mean in sign languages. For instance, Tilia and I talk sign language based on cat signs but modified—because many things must be said between cat and human different from what is said cat to cat.”
“Oh? What do you talk about? The taste of raw mouse?”
“Much is simply expressing affection, anger, disappointment. I want, Tilia wants. Fish, milk, yogurt, to go out, peace and quiet, catch the mouse, don’t touch that bird. Groom me. Let me work. Tilia does have a strong aesthetic sense and comments freely on flimsies and even on costumes. The last coverlet for the bed Tilia loathed and buried so persistently—that shit-covering gesture—that I had to trade it for another.”
“Could you speak to her now? Ask her if she believes in God or what she thinks about public nudity.”
“You don’t believe me!”
“Either you’re putting me on or you’re crazier than I am.”
“I’ll teach you how to meet a cat. Cats are formal about introductions. I got flack last time. Look Tilia can express feeling puffed. If Tilia takes a flying leap onto my chest at
first dawn from the top of the wardrobe, I get a clear notion that cat is dissatisfied with my conduct.” Luciente squinted, held her eyes shut for a few seconds, opened them again, squinted again, repeating the whole sequence, and then looked pointedly away. “This is how you meet a cat if your intentions are friendly. If you mean harm—for instance, you are approaching a cat standing over the body of a local chickadee—then you stare hard, you glare.”
Connie sank on the broad bed, giggling. “You look … ridiculous.”
“To a cat I presume I always look ridiculous. Awkward creatures by comparison, waddling around in clothes. Come! Talking is ridiculous to animals who commune through scents, colors, body language—all our minute posturing with the tongue and lips and teeth.” Luciente made a wide-eyed pleading face. “Come on, just do it once and we can get on with the day’s exploring. Just do it and get it over with.”
“You want me to make faces at your cat?”
“Just be introduced. Tilia thinks you’re hostile.”
“All my life I been pushed around by my father, by my brother Luis, by schools, by bosses, by cops, by doctors and lawyers and caseworkers and pimps and landlords. By everybody who could push. I am damned if I am going to be hassled by a cat.”
Luciente looked back levelly with her eyes like black beans. “Person must not do what person cannot do. Let’s go. No,” she said to Tilia and reached out Tilia stalked to the door, raised a paw, and slashed at it. Luciente let her out and on the far side of the screen door she paused and buried the house and its inhabitants with that gesture of disdain.
They followed the cat out. The rose on the hut was in full bloom, its scent spicing the air. The roses were luscious semi-double white cups marked on the skirts with dark crimson. “Your rose is beautiful.”
“Let me cut you one.” Luciente used a clippers from a knife with many parts. “For your hair.”
“My hair. I’m embarrassed. I hate it this way.”
“Why not change it, then?”
“I used to dye it along the part where it turned white. But in the hospital I can’t fix it.”
“When we wish to change our hair color, we change the proteins. It doesn’t grow out as it was.” Luciente was urging her along, arm around her shoulders. In a summer sleeveless shirt of a muted gold, her body was obviously female. Connie smiled to herself. Perhaps it was the lighter clothing, perhaps it was a matter of expectations—anyhow, Luciente now looked like a woman. Luciente’s face and voice and body now seemed female if not at all feminine; too confident, too unself-conscious, too aggressive and sure and graceful in the wrong kind of totally coordinated way to be a woman: yet a woman.
“I wish I could help you with your hair,” Luciente said. “Myself, I never alter my appearance except for dressing up at festivals. But many of us play with appearance.”
“Tell me about this making faces at animals. You do it with puppy dogs and mice and termites too?”
“We have a holiday, Washoe Day, when we celebrate our new community, named for a heroine of your time—a chimpanzee who was the first animal to learn to sign between species. Now we have rudimentary sign languages with many mammals. Some, like apes, use sign language with each other. Most, like cats and dogs, have other ways of communing and only sign to us.”
“Tell me—what do you say to a cow you’re about to eat?”
“Exactly. It’s changed our diet. So has the decision to feed everyone well. For each region we try to be ownfed and until the former colonies are equal in production, mammal meat is inefficient use of grains. Some regions raise cattle on grasses—”
“You never eat meat? It must be like living on welfare.”
“We do on holidays, and we have a lot of them. As a way of culling the herd. We say what we’re doing. They know it. In the same spirit, in November we hunt for a short period. That is, our village does. We’re Wamponaug Indians. We need some experience with free-living animals as prey and predator, to body the past of our tribe fully … . Though I confess I never hunt. Some of us would just as soon lapse that custom, but we lack the votes to do it.”
“You’re what? Blond Indians? Indians with red beards?”
“Barbarossa dyes per beard, in truth. Isn’t it pretty? It was brown before.”
“You! You look like me. My ancestors were Mayans, but they were hardly Wamponaugs! That’s no more alike than … Italians and Swedes!”
“We’re all a mixed bag of genes,” Luciente said. “Now I know where we’ll go.” She diddled with her kenner. “G’light, it’s me, Luciente. Can you meet us at the brooder? I’m with Connie, the person from the past. Get White Oak to fill for you. We’ll work running hard later.” She turned back to Connie. “I asked Bee to meet us at the brooder. That’s the yellow just-grew on the east. So much to glide over!” Luciente broke into a jog, saw that she was leaving Connie behind, and waited. “You set the pace.”
“Bee is your boyfriend just out of the army? Was he drafted?”
“Grafted? Everybody takes turns. We can all use arms, we’re all trained in fighting hand to hand, we can all manage facets of more complicated operations. I can shoot a jizer.”
“Women too? Did you have to go?”
“Fasure I’ve gone. Twice, Once at seventeen and once when we had a big mobe. I fought both times.”
“Fought? And you won’t go hunting?”
Luciente paused, her eyes clouding over. “A contradict. I’ve gone through a worming on it, yet it stays. Grasp, you never know whether you’re fighting people or machines—they use mostly robots or cybernauts. You never know … . Still I’d go again. At some point after naming, you decide you’re ready to go.”
“Ha! I bet lots of people decide never to go. Or does someone decide for you?”
“How could they? It’s like being a mother. Some never mother, some never go to defend.” Luciente frowned, tugging her hand through her thick black hair. “On defense your life can hang on somebody. If person didn’t want to be there, person might be careless and you might suffer. If person didn’t want to mother and you were a baby, you might not be loved enough to grow up loving and strong. Person must not do what person cannot do.”
“Ever hear of being lazy? Suppose I just don’t want to get up in the morning.”
“Then I must do your work on top of my own if I’m in your base. Or in your family, I must do your defense or your child-care. I’ll come to mind that. Who wants to be resented? Such people are asked to leave and they may wander from village to village sourer and more self-pitying as they go. We sadden at it.” Luciente shrugged. “Sometimes a healer like my old friend Diana can help. Diana the rose. A healer can go back with you and help you grow again. It’s going down and then climbing a hard path. But many heal well. Like you, Diana catches.”
The yellow building was odd, like a lemon mushroom pushing out of the ground. Decorated with sculpted tree shapes, it was windowless and faintly hummed. She realized that except for the creaking of windmills, this was the first sound of machinery she had heard here. Indeed, the door sensed them and opened, admitting them to an antechamber, then sliding shut to trap them between inner and outer doors in a blue light.
“What is all this?” She shifted nervously.
“Disinfecting. This is the brooder, where our genetic material is stored. Where the embryos grow.”
The inner doors zipped open, but into space that looked more like a big aquarium than a lab. The floor was carpeted in a blue print and music was playing, strange to her ears but not unpleasant. A big black man leaning comfortably on a tank painted over with eels and water lilies waved to them. “I’m Bee. Be guest! Be guest to what I comprend was a nightmare of your age.”
“Bottle babies!”
“No bottles involved. But fasure we’re all born from here.”
“And are you a Wamponaug Indian too?”
Bee smiled. He was a big-boned, well-muscled man with some fat around his midriff, and he moved more slowly than Luciente, with
the majesty and calm of a big ship. He steered placidly among the strange apparatus, the tanks and machines and closed compartments, something that beat slowly against the wall like a great heart, the padded benches stuck here and there. Either Bee was bald or he shaved his head, and the sleeves of his rose work shirt were rolled up to reveal on each bicep a tattoo—though the colors were more subtle and the drawing finer than any she had seen. On his left arm he had, not the cartoon of a bee, but a Japanese-looking drawing of a honeybee in flight. On his right he wore a shape something like a breaking wave. “Here embryos are growing almost ready to birth. We do that at ninemonth plus two or three weeks. Sometimes we wait tenmonth. We find that extra time gives us stronger babies.” He pressed a panel and a door slid aside, revealing seven human babies joggling slowly upside down, each in a sac of its own inside a larger fluid receptacle.
Connie gaped, her stomach also turning slowly upside down. All in a sluggish row, babies bobbed. Mother the machine. Like fish in the aquarium at Coney Island. Their eyes were closed. One very dark female was kicking. Another, a pink male, she could see clearly from the oversize penis, was crying. Languidly they drifted in a blind school. Bee pressed something and motioned her to listen near the port. The heartbeat, voices speaking.
“That can’t be the babies talking!”
“No!” Bee laughed. “Though they make noise enough. Music, voices, the heartbeat, all these sounds they can hear.”
“Light, Sacco-Vanzetti. How’s it flying?” Luciente said.
The kid was maybe sixteen. Lank brown hair in braids, swarthy skin, the kid wore a yellow uniform much like everybody’s work clothes. “Is this the woman from the past?”
Luciente performed the introductions.
Sacco-Vanzetti, whose sex she could not tell, stared. “Did you bear alive?”
“Come on Sacco-Vanzetti, don’t be narrow!” Luciente made a face.