Woman on the Edge of Time

by Marge Piercy

  Connie ground her teeth. “Any person not in a wheelchair can hurt somebody. Haven’t you ever hit anybody? Ever?”

  “Connie, you’re resisting. You’re the patient. You know why you’re here. The more you resist, the more you punish yourself. Because when you fight us, we can’t help you.”

  The orderlies brought Skip back from his two days off the ward. Acker scurried off to see the results, leaving her in peace for a while.

  “Think of the stories of heroic prisoners who tried again and again to escape,” Luciente said, clapping her on the back heartily. “One defeat is nothing. You must keep on the lookout for other holes in their security.”

  “If only I could get out for a weekend furlough! I know I could get away from Dolly easy. Even Luis would have to sleep sometimes.”

  “Why not? But try! You’re important to us, we want you to survive and break out. One attempt, one failure—you have to take that for granted. What works the first time? Poof! If I’m stiffing on a task, I may fail twenty, thirty times to fix the proper gene balance. Each time I neglect some crucial factor. But finally it blossoms! So too you must work at escape. Now you’re stronger for the exercise and your feet will heal tougher.”

  “But they’ve taken my money away. They watch me all the time. Every time I go near the door, they watch me.”

  “They have a lot to do besides watch you. You have only to watch them. Keep up your courage.”

  “Luciente, mercy! Easy. I’m flat on my back. You don’t understand. Never in your life have you been helpless—under somebody’s heel. You never lived where your enemies held power over you, power to run your life or wipe it out. You can’t understand. That’s how come you stand there feeding me empty slogans!”

  Luciente bowed her head. “You crit me justly, Connie. Forgive me. I’ll try to see your situation more clearly and make less loud noises in your ears.”

  When they came to play with Skip, the doctors were not satisfied. The violence-triggering electrodes did not cause him to try to attack them, as Alice had. Instead he turned from them and drove his fist into the wall. He pounded his head on the wall and before the attendants could force him down, blood oozed from the bandage.

  “That won’t do!” Dr. Argent frowned, passing his hand lightly over his silvery locks. “Don’t bring any visiting firemen in to inspect this one. Hmmmm.” Ever the administrator, whenever anything went wrong he withdrew from the other two, his shoulders, his back seeming to disdain them.

  “Suicide attempts are what we started with. We could be playing into the hands of a masochist, eh?” Dr. Redding glanced sideways at Dr. Argent, trying to enlist him in his little joke. “Uh, we’ll discuss the case at staff today. Other procedures may be indicated.”

  Dr. Argent linked his hands behind his back and rocked on the balls of his feet. “Not a bad idea. Won’t do to leave him around in this condition. The feds will be by next week for a tour. If we want our grant renewed, we’d better be tidy and shipshape.”

  Dr. Morgan perked up. “Surgical procedures?”

  Skip asked loudly, “You going to take these out?”

  “If our tests prove that’s best for your condition, sonny, maybe so,” Dr. Redding said. “We’ll do what’s best.”

  “Man, you must think I’m really crazy, to believe that.”

  As they turned to leave, Connie fled from her post at the door to sit in the day room. As the doctors and Acker passed, they were arguing amiably among themselves.

  “Lots of talent in your field are working to retrain sexual inversion with electroshock keyed to slides and films,” Redding was saying to Acker. “But the recidivism rate isn’t promising. If we could cure inversion surgically, we’d open up a whole new area.”

  “Let’s not get too far off the track, gentlemen,” Dr. Argent said. “We can run some tests, but our major concern is violence. Our funding is specific. Within those perimeters, of course, we have some latitude to fool around.”

  “Six to eight thousand for an operation as against hundreds of thousands to keep an invert under treatment or restraint for decades. You can’t tell me that’s not cost-effective.” Dr. Redding risked touching Dr. Argent’s shoulder companionably. “Dear to the heart of taxpayers and public officials alike. If the crime-in-the-streets money dries up, it’s something to keep in mind.”

  Dr. Argent looked at the hand. “I want results on this one, Doctor” That formal address cut like a blade. “I’m an old man. It’s now or never. For your sake, it had better be now.”

  Skip was taken to the other hospital again. When he was brought back, they had removed the electrodes but they had done something else. They had coagulated part of his limbic brain, whatever that was. Amygdalotomy was the word they used. The next day she went to see him. He looked terrible, his face sagging. His eyes were dull and bloodshot.

  “Why do you want to know how I am? What’s it to you?”

  “Don’t you remember me, Skip? I’m Connie. Your friend. You gave me money to call my niece.”

  “Some give and some take. Some take everything.”

  “Does it hurt? Your head?”

  “They say if you lose a leg, if they cut it off—what they call a resection, they have names for everything—the leg goes on hurting.”

  “At least they don’t play games with you, like they do with Alice.”

  “Different games.”

  “What are you scared they’ll do now?”

  “Why should I be scared? Who says I’m scared? You’ll see.”

  “I didn’t mean it in a bad way, Skip.” She touched his hand.

  He jerked back as if she had burned it. “Don’t try to get around me. Now I know better. Give and take, and then it’s all taken.”

  Jackrabbit was showing her a bunch of … what? Dream images? Sculptures in light? Shapes that reshaped themselves into other shapes? She felt nervous looking at them with the person who made them, the artist, right there making it happen. She was afraid she wouldn’t seem appreciative or wouldn’t say the right things or look the right way, and he’d think she was stupid. But there at her elbow was Luciente, eating white grapes from a woven basket and grunting rough enjoyment as if it were just a TV program. If she tried to think about what the images were supposed to mean, she felt miserable. But if she looked with her eyes open and let them happen to her, she could not help getting drawn in.

  The holi he was showing now had no words, no story, unlike the one he’d done with Bolivar. It was all images having something to do with the ocean and with sex and with power—not power over people, but natural power, energy. Boundaries dissolving. The sea rising, smashing into the land. Under a clear cold blue sky a sea lashed itself into foam and sprang at the shore. Waves with teeth that glinted and hair that tangled and tossed roiled over itself. Wave breaking over wave showed dark bellies arching before they crashed down in froth and slid on the sand spent and hissed dribbling back.

  Jackrabbit’s workshop stood near the mill, near enough to hear the wheel turning. There the river ground grains and corn and operated a series of pumps. Four times a day a tidal clock swung the wheel mechanism about so that it was always fixed correctly in the flow of waters. When Jackrabbit did not opaque the window and use only the sliding skylight, ripples danced on his high ceiling. Always, he told her, he could hear the mill wheel, the waves slapping the shore just underneath. The workshop was built out some feet over the river, and the side facing the water had a narrow porch.

  “Jackrabbit already has two students,” Luciente said, leaning on the railing outside the open door while Connie looked through the drawings and prints Jackrabbit started to show her next.

  “Deborah and Orion aren’t pleased I’m going on defense. They’ve been slinging about it all week,” Jackrabbit complained, knotting his hand in his curly hair.

  “Rough!” Luciente said flatly. “They knew when they chose you you hadn’t fulfilled defense. They didn’t have to wait for you as teacher. Let them do service
work for sixmonth.”

  “Their slinging saddens me,” Jackrabbit said, idly trying to tickle Connie in the ribs as she turned over the stiff sheets. “Rhythm of my life crosscutting rhythms of theirs. They feel they’re growing and want to fly faster.”

  “Can’t you work alone? You didn’t always study with a teacher.” Luciente kicked off her shoes and sat with her bare feet hanging off the porch, but she could not quite reach the water.

  “Why do you have to go on defense?” Connie turned from the pages. “I can’t look anymore. I’m sorry—I just can’t take more in.”

  “But I have to get defending out of the way before I start mothering. It’d be stupid to do it the other way, I grasp that.”

  “Your society doesn’t think that much of art and artists and all that, do you?” Connie looked away from the radiant male nude that hung on the far wall, along with twenty other paintings, drawings, prints, whatever. A naked male body hung like that—doubly hung—embarrassed her. It did not seem like something she should stare at, yet the colors glowed, the flesh shone from within. She kept glancing at it, nervously, from the corner of her eye. It was beautiful when it should not have been—like Martin, her first husband. She could not imagine him permitting anyone to paint him that way, yet if someone with talent had, his flesh would have shone so. It was neither Jackrabbit nor Bolivar. Unless Bolivar seven years younger with a bushy beard?

  Luciente turned, propped her back against a post of the railing. “Why do you say that, Connie love? The great majority of us pursue some art, and sometimes more than one.”

  “But that’s like amateur stuff. I mean, real artists. Like Jackrabbit. I don’t know anything, but I can see it’s for real. Yet he still has to work in the fields and go to the army and cook and all that.”

  Luciente grinned “But I myself am a real geneticist and I have to defend and dig potatoes and cook and all that. I also eat and make political choices and rely on those in arms to defend me—as does Jackrabbit. Zo?”

  “I comprend,” Jackrabbit said with an airy wave. “In Connie’s time it was thought some people who were good at some things, like a couple of the arts and sciences, should do nothing else.”

  “That must have made them a little stupid,” Luciente said. “A little simple—you grasp? And self-important!”

  “Such people tended to feel that other work demeaned their physics or sculpture or whatever. Isn’t that so, Connie?” He ran his fingers along her arm caressingly.

  She pulled her arm away, embarrassed again. “Well, if a person can do something … important, why should they chop onions and pick caterpillars off tomato plants?”

  “Eating isn’t important?” Luciente scowled with amazement.

  “Connie, we think art is production. We think making a painting is as real as growing a peach or making diving gear. No more real, no less real. It’s useful and good on a different level, but it’s production. If that’s the work I want to do, I don’t have to pass a test or find a patron. But I still have family duties, political duties, social duties, like every other lug. How not?”

  “Everybody? What about Bolivar? He’s always traveling.”

  “Bolivar does it all in a couple of lumps. At spring planting, person does the year’s quota and then some! Does two solid weeks of preserving in August or September.”

  “But going on defense—isn’t it dangerous?”

  They both laughed together, that merry belly laughter. “How not?” Luciente asked. “The enemy is few but determined. Once they ran this whole world, they had power as no one, even the Roman emperors, and riches drained from everywhere. Now they have the power to exterminate us and we to exterminate them. They have such a limited base—the moon, Antarctica, the space platforms—for a population mostly of androids, robots, cybernauts, partially automated humans, that the war is one of attrition and small actions in the disputed areas, raids almost anyplace. We live with it. It’s the tag end. We fear them, but we’ve prevailed so far and we believe we’ll win … if history is not reversed. That is, the past is a disputed area.”

  “I don’t understand! And it makes me dizzy! But if Jackrabbit goes in the army, he could get killed. Aren’t some people worth sparing?”

  “Show me someone who isn’t,” Luciente said. “Who isn’t precious to self? How could we decide who to spend and who to save?”

  “Risk, danger … we don’t find them evil,” Jackrabbit said slowly. “I don’t twitter to go. I fasure don’t want to give back. But I don’t want to be ignorant. The creature inside a shell is a soft slug, like a worm. Who should protect me? Bolivar? Luciente? Bee? Hawk? Who’ll stand between me and death, me and sickness, me and drowning? I must serve the talent that uses me, the energy that flows through me, but I mustn’t make others serve me. Don’t you see the difference?”

  “Won’t you miss him? You must mind his going?” she asked Luciente.

  “Mind? How not? I mind too we’re still at war. I mind that we can’t enjoy peace and push all energies into what people need and want. I’ll miss Jackrabbit fasure. And I think it grossly unfair that I should be missing first Bee and then Jackrabbit in one year … .” Luciente looked at Jackrabbit, her eyes liquid and somber. Then her face lightened. “But I’m excited about Jackrabbit mothering. I’m a kidbinder. I’ll mother away too … .” Luciente turned to stare at the rush of the waters. “Deborah and Orion must decide if they’re going to go on working here alone this sixmonth without you, or if we should close your workshop till you get back.”

  “They have a week yet to decide.” Jackrabbit took Connie’s hand. “Why are you shy with me? What do I do that tightens you?”

  “Nothing!” She glared at Luciente in appeal.

  “Then why do you tug your hand away?”

  “Why do you want to … hold it?”

  Jackrabbit smiled. “When I come back from defense I’ll be running mature. Then you won’t be shy with me. Bee is nice, but I’m just as nice.” He made an exaggerated face of flirtation, batting his eyes. “Don’t you feel sorry for me, exiled for six-month? Don’t you want to comfort me?”

  “Don’t tease Connie so.” Luciente made a fist at him. “You promised not to tease Connie!”

  “Don’t you like to be teased? At least a little?”

  “When you’re a mother,” Connie said, laughing for the first time in days, “then you can tease me.”

  “If you experienced a pain in your abdominal region, if it was diagnosed as appendicitis, you might be afraid of the operation, but you wouldn’t resist it. You wouldn’t attempt to leave the hospital, because you’d know that you were sick and needed help.” Acker had cornered her again in the day room, where she had been watching a serial about a lawyer. Behind Acker’s back, Tina made faces to Connie to give support. “Now, you can’t see your brain. But you can see the output from the EEG machine. You can’t read it, because you aren’t trained, but your doctors can. You can’t see your appendix either. But you accept the expert’s opinion in either case, or condemn yourself to getting sicker and sicker.”

  “Except for not getting exercise and lousy food and those meds that knock me out, I’m fine. I walked twenty miles, didn’t I?”

  “And came back with abscesses on your feet. You can see those. But you can’t see abscesses in your brain, so to speak. Connie, you’re going to thank us. Because thanks to modern medical science, you’re not condemned to spend your life in a psychiatric unit.”

  “Look, I guess it’s cheaper to keep me on welfare than in here. But I’ll go home tomorrow. I’ll kill myself trying to get work. I promise! I’ll scrub floors. I don’t care anymore. I’d rather do housework for white ladies than be in here!”

  “Of course. And we want you to be able to return to useful work, to return to society safely—safely for you and for others. But there’s the rub, Connie. No one can trust you. If you had typhoid fever, you wouldn’t expect us to let you march out the door untreated and go walking through the streets of Manh
attan freely infecting others. Now would you?” Acker waited, beaming, his hands on his slightly spread knees. Behind him, Tina was miming a gruesome death.

  “I don’t think I got TB or typhoid fever—”

  “I was speaking by comparison.”

  “I understand that!” How stupid he thought she was! “But I don’t believe I’m sick. Like you, I’ve done things I regret and things I don’t regret. Since I’m poor, I can’t hire lawyers to make things come out right for me when I get across the law.”

  “Always bad luck. Always a hard-luck story. You haven’t learned a thing, to listen to you. But I think you know better, Connie, and you’re simply resisting. When you look at your situation clearly, instead of through the eyes of irrational fear, you’ll see we’re your only real friends … . Look at Skip. I think he’s on the road to recovery. His attitude has changed since his operation. He’s trying, Connie. And that trying is going to pay off, you wait and see. He’ll be back in society soon, a productive individual, healed of his illnesses, ready to make a life for himself.”

  Tina was playing a violin and dropped her hands quickly as he turned to leave.

  Connie brooded over what he had said about Skip. It was true, Skip had changed. He parroted back whatever they said to him; he told them he was grateful. When they took him out and tested him with homosexual photographs, he had no what they called negative reactions. Meaning he didn’t get a hard-on. He told her he felt dead inside. They were pleased with him; they were going to write him up for a medical journal.

  Skip wanted to get out. They promised he would. She wondered. Would they really let him out of their clutches? His bandages were off now and his hair was beginning to grow back. He walked around the ward, helping the attendants. He was playing the game. It was still a game, she sensed that; there was a remnant of strong will gone cold at the core pushing him. She had tried to escape in her way, he was trying in his way, with something gutted in him. Something beautiful and quick was burned out. It hurt her to watch him. Because he was too beautiful and tempted them, they had fixed him. He moved differently: clumsily. It was as if he had finally agreed to imitate the doctors’ coarse, clumsy masculinity for a time, but it was mastery with them and humility with him. He moved like a robot not expertly welded. Yet he was no robot, whatever they thought they had done. She could feel the will burning in him, a will to burst free.