Woman on the Edge of Time

by Marge Piercy

  “What did she say they did?”

  “Valente hustled me past before I could ask any questions.”

  “It looks like they busted her head. Maybe she tried to get away.” Connie stared at the tall barred windows.

  “Is Valente so crude she’d leave visible damage? A sock with a soap in it, that’s what the attendant used to use on me.”

  Skip came to the doorway. “Hsssst! Connie!”

  “Skip, I can’t pay you back yet. My niece didn’t come Sunday. But she’s coming next weekend,” she said quickly.

  “They brought me down Friday. Alice was already in bed, bandaged up. She told me they took her by ambulance to the city, where they operated on her, and then they brought her back!”

  “Hey, did they beat up on her?”

  Skip shook his head. “They did a kind of operation. They stuck needles in her brain.”

  “Are you kidding?” Maybe Skip was crazy. Nevertheless she felt weak with fear. “What kind of needles? She could talk to Sybil.”

  “She certainly did,” Sybil said haughtily. “She was in better shape than if she’d had shock.”

  “You don’t believe me, but you’ll see!” With broken-winged dignity, Skip shambled back to the men’s side.

  “Needles in the brain …” It sounded like a crazy fantasy—like Sybil’s microwave ovens that burned out magic. Glenda insisted that electroshock was a dentist’s drill. Maybe they had given Alice a shot in the head, a new drug injected directly in the brain? That too was crazy. Those new drugs they tried out made your kidneys turn to rock or caused your tongue to swell black in your mouth or your skin to crust in patches or your hair to fall in loose handfuls, like stuffing from an old couch. Perhaps a drug injected right in the brain could turn you into a zombie as quick as too much shock.

  This ward was peculiar, because it was like a hospital ward. The mental hospital had always seemed like a bad joke; nothing got healed here. The first time in she had longed for what they called health. She had kept hoping that someone was going to help her. She had remained sure that somewhere in what they called a hospital was someone who cared, someone with answers, someone who would tell her what was wrong with her and mold her a better life. But the pressure was to say please and put on lipstick and sit at a table playing cards, to obey and work for nothing, cleaning the houses of the staff. To look away from graft and abuse. To keep quiet as you watched them beat other patients. To pretend that the rape in the linen room was a patient’s fantasy.

  But this was a real hospital, even if an ancient one. There were fifteen women on her side of the ward. Her bed was a hospital bed that went up and down, more comfortable than anything she had slept in for years, since she had been the mistress-secretary-errand girl-servant-housekeeper to Professor Silvester. Feeling like an old hand, she smiled at Sybil as they began figuring how they would make do here, the space that might exist, the fringe benefits that could be squeezed.

  Tuesday morning she was confined to her bed, as if she were sick. The doctors were to come in the morning. Monday afternoon they had been sent through a whole battery of tests—blood, urine, reflexes, all fussed over by Dr. Morgan. Redding had not been there. He taught someplace. He was connected with something called NYNPI. He was an important man. She was beginning to feel that his actual appearance was ominous. Better when he was being busy elsewhere. On others. There were others. Patients in the hospital in the city. Unsatisfactory in some way. Outpatients slipped away. They could not be depended upon. Their families butted in. They, tucked now in beds in their rows, were to be in some way more satisfactory.

  She dozed in her bed, groggy on drugs. Casually in the early morning ward she cast an invitation to Luciente. She felt shy, embarrassed. Tentatively she opened her mind and sensed Luciente’s response. How easy it had become to slip over to Mattapoisett. She did not return exhausted. As if her mind had developed muscles, she could easily draw Luciente, she could leap in and out of Luciente’s time.

  Luciente’s family—Bee with his head tilted back beaming at her, the old woman Sojourner on his left, Barbarossa, Otter in long braids looking Chinese, the slight blond man Morningstar bent over Dawn, Jackrabbit staring at one of the decorated panels with a dreamy frown, Hawk thoughtfully picking her nose, Luxembourg about to say something and visibly remembering she was no longer Hawk’s mother and still on the silence taboo—were seated around a table in the fooder, breakfasting on whole grains, nuts, sunflower seeds, blueberries, yogurt. The milk tasted full of flavor, like milk from her grandmother’s. The teacher said raw milk made you sick; grandmother said it made you strong. Herb tea in large pots steamed.

  “You don’t have coffee?”

  “To start meetings. In the middle if they run long. Same with tea.” Luciente yawned. “When we get up running early, to harvest.”

  “But you don’t drink it every day?”

  Bee shifted as if he might respond, but Barbarossa was ready with an answer. “Coffee, tea, sugar, tobacco, they all took land needed to feed local people who were starving. Now some land is used for world luxuries, but most for necessary crops. Imagine the plantation system, people starving while big fincas owned by foreigners grew for wealthy countries as cash crops a liquid without food value, bad for kidneys, hearts, if drunk in excess.”

  “I couldn’t face the day without coffee! That’s the worst thing I’ve heard about your way of living.”

  Everyone looked glum and even Jackrabbit stopped staring at the offending panel. Five people started at once talking about protein and underdevelopment and the creation of hunger, when Dawn piped up, “People, listen! I have a dream this morning.”

  Other conversation stopped. She preened in the attention, making her face serious. Morningstar’s head bobbed over her like a pale sun. “I dreamed I flew into the past. I flew to that river and kept that nuclear power plant from killing everybody in Philadelphia.”

  “This was a waking dream or a sleeping dream?” Otter gave her a skeptical smile, arching her brows.

  “Well, I was kind of asleep.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with waking dreams,” Sojourner said in a reedy voice. “To want to save lives is a good desire.”

  “Everyone has been making too much fuss about connecting with the past.” Luciente exchanged a wry look with Otter. “I myself am guilty.” They both smiled.

  “Magdalena says it’s important,” Dawn insisted. “Says we may wink out!”

  Bee—whose gaze Connie had carefully not met—rumbled from deep in his chest, “To plant beans correctly is important. To smoke fish so it doesn’t rot. To store food in vacuum. To fight well, as you did Saturday. To make good decisions in meeting. To be kind to each other.”

  “But some things are more important!” Dawn stuck out her soft chin. “I want to do something very important. Like fly into the past to make it come out right.”

  “Nobody can make things come out right,” Hawk said, her straight nose wrinkled in disgust. “Pass the honey.”

  “No one is helpless. No one controls.” Sojourner had a flattened leathery face and eyes that twinkled with a lively pleasure. “We can’t make things come out in the past. We can only speak to those who listen.” She winked at Connie.

  “Are there many of us?” Connie asked. “Many who come here?”

  “Mmmm … what?” Luciente was yawning again. “Who come? Only five so far. It’s odd.” Luciente’s hand made boxes in the air. “Most we’ve reached are females, and many of those in mental hospitals and prisons. We find people whose minds open for an instant, but at the first real contact, they shrink in terror.”

  “Why are you contacting us? You said I’d understand but I forgot to think about it. It’s kind of a vacation from the hospital.”

  A surge of discomfort passed around the table. “It’s hard to explain,” Bee said, frowning. “Nobody’s supposed to discuss advances in science with you. It might be dangerous—for you, for us. Your scientists were so … childish? Carefu
lly brought up through a course of study entered on early never to ask consequences, never to consider a broad range of effects, never to ask on whose behalf …”

  “But I’m no scientist. What do you want from me?” Her eyes touched Bee and withdrew as if burned, after-image of black on her retina. Suppose there was a price? Suppose they wanted something from her, something, anything. Vaguely she imagined herself smuggling back a weapon, a bomb disguised as a toothbrush. Why should they have been so nice to her if they didn’t want something? In her lap under the table her hands sought each other, coldly sweating.

  Barbarossa cleared his throat. “We could put it: at certain cruxes of history … forces are in conflict. Technology is imbalanced. Too few have too much power. Alternate futures are equally or almost equally probable … and that affects the … shape of time.”

  She did not like to be lectured by him, for he reminded her of other men, authorities in her time, even though she could see that in this setting he had no edge on the others. “But you exist.” Still she waited for the price, the stinger.

  “Maybe. Maybe not.” Luciente smiled, her eyes liquid and sad. “It’s not clear. We’re struggling to exist.”

  “I don’t understand,” she said resentfully.

  “You move your hand. You wave it. Do you understand how?” Barbarossa too smiled, his blue eyes asking her to listen. “How does the decision in your brain fire your hand? Yet you move.”

  Her glance fell on Dawn, pouting in her chair. “I wish I could let you fly away into the past with me. For a visit. You’d fix things for me anyhow. Make me so happy. But not to where I’m kept. No!” That child being wheeled to electroshock, her fine brown hair plastered to her scalp with sweat, her eyes so wide open staring at the ceiling that a ring of white circled her pupils.

  “Dawn, it isn’t bad to want to help, to want to work, to seize history,” Luciente said, getting up to caress her. “But to want to do it alone is less good. To hand history to someone like a cake you baked.”

  Connie looked across the table at Bee, meeting his gaze for the first time. “Are you really in danger?”

  “Yes.” His big head nodded in cordial agreement. “You may fail us.”

  “Me? How?”

  “You of your time. You individually may fail to understand us or to struggle in your own life and time. You of your time may fail to struggle together.” His voice was warm, almost teasing, yet his eyes told her he was speaking seriously. “We must fight to come to exist, to remain in existence, to be the future that happens. That’s why we reached you.”

  “I may not continue to exist if I don’t check back … . What good can I do? Who could have less power? I’m a prisoner. A patient. I can’t even carry a book of matches or keep my own money. You picked the wrong savior this time!”

  “The powerful don’t make revolutions,” Sojourner said with a broad yellow grin.

  “Oh, revolution!” She grimaced. “Honchos marching around in imitation uniforms. Big talk and bad-mouthing everybody else. Noise in the streets and nothing changes.”

  “No, Connie! It’s the people who worked out the labor-and-land intensive farming we do. It’s all the people who changed how people bought food, raised children, went to school!” Otter was so excited she leaned far forward over the table till one of her fat braids dipped into the yogurt. As she argued Hawk picked Otter’s braid out and wiped it with a cloth napkin without Otter even noticing. Hawk smiled. Her smile still said mother. For a moment her glance rested on Dawn wistfully. “Who made new unions, withheld rent, refused to go to wars, wrote and educated and made speeches.”

  “But there was a thirty-year war that culminated in a revolution that set up what we have. Or else there wasn’t and we don’t exist.” Luciente held her hands up, her eyes big and laughing.

  “You’re not talking much this morning,” Connie said warily. Was Luciente sore at her about Bee?

  “Oh, grasp, Luciente’s still half buzzy,” Otter said teasingly. “Jackrabbit and I had to go in delegation last night to fetch per home from Treefrog to do cleanup.”

  Jackrabbit roused and waved in response, traces of paint and something shiny on his arms as if he had not quite cleaned up.

  “Take Connie to the museum,” Luxembourg said. “Then person can understand us and our history better.”

  “No!” Luciente woke up. “Guidelines set in grandcil by everyone call for no specific history in this proj.”

  “How can a person understand without understanding?”

  “That argument belongs to meeting,” Luciente said firmly. “I wait you to raise it there, Luxembourg. Until, no blurring!”

  “Zo, you shook Luciente awake,” Jackrabbit said, grinning. “Charging into righteous battle with a grandcil ruling in per teeth.”

  Luciente rubbed her cheek, embarrassed. “Maybe we can have coffee this morning? All this talk about it I could use some.”

  “Should we send a note of complaint to Diana of Treefrog?” Otter asked, and everybody laughed, enjoying their power to embarrass Luciente.

  Dr. Redding had arrived on the ward as she slipped back. Nobody was paying attention to her. I could have stayed longer, she thought regretfully, but things looked interesting. Dr. Redding, Dr. Morgan Acker, the psychologist, Miss Moynihan, the EEG technician, and even the secretary, Patty, and the attendants were gathered around Alice’s bed.

  “I want you to pay close and careful attention this morning, and I want you to keep in mind in the ensuing months of this project what you’re going to witness demonstrated. I expect to see immediate effects in a higher level of confidence among staff,” Dr. Redding said coldly.

  Dr. Morgan’s ears were red sticking through his pale thin hair. He hunched smaller. Misery rose from him like a stench. It was quiet in the women’s ward.

  “Don’t get too sure of yourself, Dr. Ever-Ready.” Alice grinned under the hill of bandages. “That fat kid doctor there, he scared. He scared of me. Thinking I be fixing to bite it off.” Alice snapped her teeth. Under the sheet she wriggled her long body.

  “Behold, Francis,” Dr. Redding said genially. “Patients recognize hesitation. You were reluctant to include Alice in the experiment because of the very violence that makes her a suitable subject. Your fears are groundless. Poor impulse control has brought this subject into repeated scrapes with society. The very lack of control that has stunted her development, we can provide her.”

  “You just saying I do what I want. Don’t you wish you just sometime know what you be craving to do? Mr. Beardo there, he poor at controlling impulses too. Making it with Miss White Coat Hot Pants. You all just go have one on me and get this crap out from my head.”

  A tremor of embarrassment bent them all, grass in the wind. Then they drew mutual strength, gathered around Alice’s bed, and silently decided to pretend not to hear her. Acker muttered something about “random hostility patterns.” They clustered around a machine that was writing with pens eight at a time on paper that had been heaping up on the floor in accordion piles.

  “All that paper,” Alice said, louder. “Running out like toilet paper gone wild. How many trees we use up this morning?”

  Redding held out his wrist watch. “Argent and Superintendent Hodges will be here soon. Let us hope. And the camera crew.” Morgan and Moynihan were exclaiming over spikes. All the time the pens kept writing and the paper kept dropping in its neat diarrhea on the floor. Redding came to a decision. “Nurse, time to get off those bandages. Mrs. Valente, bring us coffee and we’ll hang out in the conference room till our guests come to the party, eh?” He sped out, with his staff in pursuit.

  The nurse began removing the head bandages. Cautiously Connie and Sybil edged nearer and nearer till Connie called out, “Is it true you got needles stuck in your … head?”

  “No he. Electrodes, they call them.”

  Connie stared expectantly as the bald scalp emerged from the swathing. Like Bee. “But I don’t see anything!”

  �
�They inside, girl. What you expect, I look like a goddamn pincushion? They stupid, but they not that stupid!”

  “Alice, if they’re electrodes, where are the wires?” Sybil asked cautiously.

  “You old-fashion. No wires. They use a little radio, and they stick that inside too!”

  “Now, you cut this out,” the nurse said suddenly. “That’s enough. Quiet on the ward. You’re disturbing this patient.”

  “I don’t see how we could possibly disturb Alice. It isn’t we who put a radio and electrodes in her head,” Sybil said loftily.

  “Quiet down or I’ll give you a shot that will lay you out flat,” the nurse said, hands on her hips.

  Back at their own beds, Sybil whispered, “The nurse didn’t contradict us about the electrodes. Could it be true?”

  “But what for?”

  “Control. To turn us into machines so we obey them,” Sybil whispered.

  What nonsense it had to be! They were crazy, they were imagining this. She wished she had stayed in Mattapoisett.

  At eleven the staff was back with two more doctors and a video tape crew. One of the newcomers she recognized from the Christmas party of her last commitment as the superintendent of the hospital. Dr. Samuel Hodges was over six feet tall and in his late fifties, with only a circlet of crisp curly gray hair like a laurel wreath around his ruddy dome. The other man was older, with silky white hair, a radiant tan, a fine gray suit, natty but conservatively tailored. Dr. Redding and Dr. Hodges called him Chip, but Dr. Morgan called him Dr. Argent. Dr. Redding asked him how St. Peter’s Island had been, casually throwing at the super that Dr. Argent’s family owned an island off Georgia. Scoring, point-counting.

  “A very small island,” Dr. Argent said. “Used to offer shelter to runaway slaves. Now to runaway slaving doctors.” He spoke differently than the others; at first she thought perhaps he was English, and sometimes his voice reminded her of the Kennedys speaking on TV. He wore his white hair a little long and wherever he stood became the center of the room. Redding talked to him with the soft edge of diffidence mellowing his voice. A teasing edge brought a laugh up to Redding’s throat and kept it waiting there, like a little warning light.