Woman on the Edge of Time

by Marge Piercy

  Outside the trees were turning early, from the drought. The branches of the pines ended in brown nosegays of dead needles. They were cutting their losses. The maples and oaks sported branches already bronze, a dulled version of autumn color. The sky was a hazy buff blue, as if it were dusty for miles up. By nine o’clock, when they took her over to the other hospital, it was already hot for September.

  They did not cut and shave her head until she was on the new ward. Valente had told Dr. Redding it upset the patients. The cold touch of the scissors nudged her nape, her ear with its shivery weight like a shark nosing past. With each clack of the blades, her hair fell from her, to lie like garbage on the floor. To be swept up and thrown away. No blackberry bushes would grow from her head’s shearing. Rich in nitrogen and trace elements: Luciente was always saying things like that. But Luciente was not with her this morning.

  Sybil had stood at the door watching her go, her face working as she tried not to weep. In her mind now she could see Sybil’s auburn hair falling, the long beautiful hair of a fine natural red that varied strand to strand. Often she had brushed Sybil’s hair for her and always it amazed her how much yellow and brown and brass and carrot and chestnut there was in Sybil’s auburn hair, a spectrum of warm colors.

  As they were shaving her head, she tried to think of Bee, whose massive well-modeled head looked handsome that way. But she did not think she would look as strong and fine with her hair stolen. She had had no breakfast. They gave her a heavy sedative but they did not knock her out. They told her she would not really be conscious, but she was. She could hear the orderlies making jokes as they wheeled her to the operating room.

  She had been prepared for any horror. Anything except boredom.

  First Dr. Redding drilled on her skull. It did not hurt; it was merely horrifying. She could feel the pressure, she could feel the bone giving way, she could hear the drill entering. Then she saw them take up a needle to insert something. She did not understand what it was, because she felt nothing. They seemed to be waiting for it to take effect, whatever it was, and she waited too in gasping anxiety until she caught a reference to “radiopaque solution.” They were dyeing her and she was dying. The pun hung in her penetrated brain.

  Next they fitted a machine over her, what they referred to as a stereotactic machine, and they pounded it into her head with three sharp metal pins as if she were a wall they were attaching a can opener to. Tap, tap, tap. They seemed to be figuring out at what point they were going to zero in, as they put it She felt faint and weird. She floated miles above her helpless body propped in green sheets and towels in a sort of operating chair, like a fancy dentist’s chair. They were using an x-ray machine. They spoke of target structures and Dr. Redding boasted, “No more than a point-five-millimeter factor of error.”

  Terror cut through the veils of the drug like a needle penetrating the bone supposed to protect her fragile spongy brain. How much of her was crammed into that space? Perhaps they could wipe out the memory of Claud by the slip of a needle. The brain was so dumb, not like the heart knocking on the breastbone loud and fluttery as a captured bird. It hid in its cage of bone, imagining itself safe.

  She wanted to weep, to scream. But she was contained in a balloon way back up through her skull, perhaps floating out through the hole they had cut in her, floating out there above them, lighter than air. How patient they were to take so much of their valuable medical time deciding where to push in. How wonderful that they did not simply use a great big can opener and take off the top of her skull and scrape out the brains with a spoon. Some people ate brains.

  “You could eat them. Fried,” she said suddenly.

  Morgan’s eyes above the mask widened. “What did she say?”

  “Something about eating,” the operating nurse said.

  “Doubtless we stimulated an appetite center,” Dr. Redding said. “We’re down there. The higher you cauterize, the more you involve the intellectual faculties. I don’t think these patients have a lot to spare in that department. We’re after the centers of aggression, the primitive emotions run amok.”

  Now they were looking at photographs, like those of the moon taken by astronauts. That unknown precious country of her brain. They had a dummy second machine, like the one sitting on her skull squatting like a mosquito about to draw blood, and they were fiddling with the dummy. She would have loved to try it out on them. Suddenly she thought that these men believed feeling itself a disease, something to be cut out like a rotten appendix. Cold, calculating, ambitious, believing themselves rational and superior, they chased the crouching female animal through the brain with a scalpel. From an early age she had been told that what she felt was unreal and didn’t matter. Now they were about to place in her something that would rule her feelings like a thermostat.

  Time … time. Yes, the surprise was the boredom. She could almost have slept, hunched there. The green masks of robbers covered their faces, but she could easily tell Dr. Redding from Dr. Morgan. Redding was brisk and in control and chipper. Morgan was prissy with worry, his every motion a bureaucratic procedure judged against inner or outer rules.

  Now a new object was presented, crowed over. The nurses crowded close to see. The new toy. It was a metal disk embossed like a coin, no bigger than a quarter, with tubes and a miniature dialysis bag attached. She would be a walking monster with a little computer inside and a year’s supply of dope to keep her stupid. The whole thing would fit in the palm of her hand; it would fit under the roof of her skull, perched cozily on the brain.

  Her head felt wrong as they put it in. Everything felt wrong. Maybe it would feel right again. They were closing with cement. A temporary measure. They said they wanted to monitor the reading for a month or two, they might want to change the chemical she was being fed from that dialysis bag. They kept their options open with a cement plug.

  Afterward she had a massive headache. Even her teeth seemed all to ache. She did not want to move. She did not care about anything. She lay in her bed and through half-closed eyes she ignored the patients and nurses passing on the neurology ward.

  After they moved her back to her own ward, for a week she lay numb and uncaring. Acker came and talked to her. He tried to get her to perform tests and answer questions, he brought his charts and what she always thought of as his children’s games. Why should she answer? They were waiting for her to heal before they played with her, she felt.

  Skip, who was being a good patient, brought her food on a tray. Politely, he did not look at her, more nude than if her clothes had been taken away.

  Tina read her the newspaper, tried to start conversations. Sybil came in and sat patiently, let her alone and then returned, hoping. Tina’s voice, rising like an indignant wasp, buzzed at her. She could not want to talk. She could not care. She was a spoiled orange rotting green. The only person she cared to watch was Skip as he came and went, sweeping the ward and running errands for the attendants and the other patients. He was dressed in his street clothes and his hair had grown short and patchy. He looked younger and older than he had: younger in his angularity, his new awkwardness; older in the wary lack of expression on his face. She felt his will all the time like a knife he was carrying concealed, and she envied him for retaining his will. She wondered, when she could bring herself to think at all, how he preserved the power of his will hidden inside.

  They had decided to operate next week on Alice. They felt they knew just what tissue in her brain to coagulate now, where to burn a hole in what was called Alice. Then she would have her electrodes removed, they promised, just like Skip. They were tired of playing with Alice, who had become sullen and passive. At times she giggled a lot, she seemed drunk and slaphappy, sitting on the edge of her bed. Then she slumped into a blank depression.

  Skip now had grounds privileges. He went to the canteen and brought back doughnuts, danishes, candy bars, cigarettes for any of the patients who had the money. The doctors had their own coffeemaker near the meeting room, and ev
en the patients were sometimes allowed to make coffee in the afternoon in the small kitchen the lower staff used. Dolly had come by to visit her right after her operation, but had not been allowed in. Dolly had deposited some more money for Connie. Connie pretended to order sweets from the canteen with the others. Remembering Luciente’s urging, she withdrew change for an order but then quietly told Skip not to bring her anything. Seventy-five cents at a time, she was accumulating capital for escape. That much energy remained to her.

  Wednesday Dr. Redding announced to Skip loudly, so that all the other patients could hear, that Skip was being granted a weekend furlough. He could go home to his parents from Friday night through Sunday afternoon. Dr. Redding rolled out the pronouncement with conscious drama, saying that if Skip proved he could handle himself, this was the first of many furloughs, the first step back into society. They were all to envy Skip; they all did. The doctors were almost done with Skip, unless further surgery should prove necessary, a little phrase they added.

  Skip said he was grateful and he’d show them he could handle a visit home. He drooped there, no longer graceful under his shorn hair that spoke of the barracks, of the army, and looking Redding in the eyes, he told him how good he was going to be, how he was their cured and grateful little boy.

  She felt a strange pang, like something plucked in her.

  Friday, as Skip was organizing himself to go home and waiting for his parents to come to collect him, she got up for the first time since her operation, except for walking to the bathroom and back, and put on her robe. Shaking, she tied the loose cord and stumbled off to the men’s side. She sat down on Skip’s bed and waited for the dizziness to clear. She wasn’t allowed to do that, but the attendants hadn’t appeared yet.

  Skip looked at her with bloodshot weary cautious eyes. “Hello, monster,” he said softly.

  “Hello, monster,” she said back, and smiled for the first time since before her operation. “There’s too little of you and too much of me.”

  “Can you feel it inside?”

  “I feel rotten. Snowed.”

  “I admire you for trying to get away, you know? I wish you’d made it.”

  “If I get a chance, I’ll try it again,” she mouthed softly.

  “But … with that thing in your head, you might die.”

  “Maybe it’ll just wear out its batteries or whatever it runs on and give up. Use up the drug. I know a guy, Otis, who has a metal peg in his knee from Vietnam.”

  “I think maybe something in the brain’s more dangerous … . But why not go down trying?”

  “You’re going outside today.”

  Skip grimaced. “Home with my loving parents. Back from the factory where they sent me for repairs, on a trial basis. Like if it’s broken, get it fixed. If it’s crooked, get it straightened out. If it’s kinky, iron it.”

  “But you still got a will to fight them, I can feel it.”

  “They won something. I don’t feel like fucking anybody. Or loving anybody. I don’t feel any love at all. I feel like a big block of ice.”

  Tony walked by whistling, saw her sitting on the bed, and came in. To avoid his touch, she rose. “Take care, Skip.”

  “I mean to take care.” He gave her a mirthless grin. Then he kissed her lightly on the mouth. “You keep trying.” His lips were cool and hard. Shyly she kissed him back.

  Tony made obscene smacking noises. “Come on, break it up. No PC. They fixed you okay from being a faggot, but you’re crazy anyhow!”

  As quickly as she could move on her heavy waterlogged legs, her dizzy body riding its private stormy weather, she lumbered back through the ward to her own bed.

  Sunday night Skip did not return. By Monday the rumor crept through the ward as fast as patient could whisper to patient. Sunday morning early, Skip had slit his throat with an electric knife in the kitchen of his parents’ home. They had hidden the razor blades, the sleeping pills, the aspirin, but they had not thought of the electric carving knife.

  Sybil murmured to Connie that she had heard that his father had been angry at Dr. Redding and called him a quack. They felt it was unacceptable for the hospital to send Skip home to kill himself in their kitchen.

  She got up from her bed and moved wearily around the ward, with Sybil at her side. Drs. Redding and Morgan were right thinking they had cured Skip, she thought, fighting the tilting aisle. Before he had only been able to attempt suicide, cries for help carved on his body. They had cured him of fumbling, of indecision. They had taught him to act, they had taught him the value of a quick clean death.

  FIFTEEN

  “Sha! You’re the sharpest piper I ever gaped!” The woman was propped on the bed surrounded by mirrors—mirrors on the ceiling, the back of the bed, and one side.

  Connie stood flatfooted in the center of the windowless room, staring. She had tried and tried to make contact with Luciente, but she had been unable to feel her presence all day. Finally, in a stubborn fury she had cast herself forward, demanding that Luciente receive her.

  The woman’s hair, stippled mauve and platinum, was arranged in an intricate tower of curls and small gewgaws, dripping pearls like a wedding headdress. She wore a long dress of slippery substance that changed color as she moved and emitted a tinkling sound; it was slit away up the side and cut out here and there so that her breasts occasionally peeked out or her navel appeared and reappeared. When Connie had materialized, the woman had been lying back on a mound of ball-shaped pillows smoking a pipe and chewing what looked like orange marshmallows from a small bowl on the hairy coverlet. The room was air conditioned cool.

  “Someone’s playing a joke on me, sending a private trans. I don’t think it’s even a slightly funny. When I find out, you’ll be sorry! Cash won’t put up with that! And he has means to find out, you dudfreak, whoever you suppose to be!” She popped off the bed and stood facing Connie, quivering with anger. They were about the same height and weight, although the woman was younger and her body seemed a cartoon of femininity, with a tiny waist, enormous sharp breasts that stuck out like the brassieres Connie herself had worn in the fifties—but the woman was not wearing a brassiere. Her stomach was flat but her hips and buttocks were oversized and audaciously curved. She looked as if she could hardly walk for the extravagance of her breasts and buttocks, her thighs that collided as she shuffled a few steps.

  “How’d you get in here anyhow? Nobody but contract girls and middle flacks stack in this complex. It’s strictly SG’ed.”

  “SG’ed?”

  “Segregated and guarded—are you cored? How did you get in here? Well?” She stomped to and fro on small—ridiculously small—feet. She looked as if any minute she might fall over through imbalance, the small feet and tiny ankles and wrists, the tiny waist, the small head with the tower of Pisa on top.

  Somehow Connie had wound up in the wrong place. She had missed Mattapoisett and hit some other place in the future. “Maybe I am in the wrong place, but they let me in. See for yourself. So where am I?”

  “They never let you in. Ha! Nobody would take you for a contracty. You’ve never even had your first grafts. If you ever had a beauty-op, you’ve reverted. They’d never leave you with that hair and that skin! You’re as dark … I mean I’d have been on that side myself. But of course I had a full series! When I was fifteen, I was selected, and I’m still on the full shots and re-ops.”

  “Where am I, though? I’m not in Mattapoisett, obviously.”

  “You dud, you’re in New York. Where else?”

  “Where in New York?” She looked for a window, but there were none. “My name’s Connie. I’m sorry I got in here by mistake.”

  “You bet you’re sorry. I’m contracted to a fourth-level SD.” She batted her eyelashes, fully an inch long, and waited for the effect of her statement. Her eyes had a tendency to droop, the lids pulling down under the weight. “This is 168th and General File, and this whole plex is reserved for contracties and middle flacks. There’s nobody here except me
dical, legal, security, and transport flacks of the middle level. Anyhow”—she tossed her head carefully, while the tower of hair trembled—“I’m Gildina 547-921-45-822-KBJ. You’d better give me an expla how you got in here or I’m about to beep.”

  “Time traveling.” Connie smiled with sophistication. It was almost fun. She imagined how Luciente must have felt laying down the unbelievable truth to naïve ears. Now she was the visitor from elsewhere. Somehow talking with Gildina was a little like talking with Dolly on speed, and a little like conversation with a poodle. “There’s a project, you know.”

  “Yeah?” Gildina was trying to decide whether she should pretend to know or not. “Cash knows that stuff—after all, he’s fourth level. What’s that got to do with slamming in to my parment?”

  “All the kinks aren’t out. I’ve been in 1976. I was supposed to wind up back here, but not in your parment, believe me.”

  “Ha! You’re a dud and you look old too—you must be twenty-five or six! You’re a fem too, even if you aren’t opped. They’d never pick you to time travel. They’d pick a Cybo or an Assassin!”

  “I was born in 1938. You want to see my welfare ID?” Actually, of course, she didn’t have it; it was back in the hospital.

  “What eye-dee?”

  “What you show—a card so they know who you are.”

  “But everybody’s implanted. What’s the good them knowing who, if they don’t know where and how?” Gildina threw herself on the bed. “Maybe too much Rapture. I really ride out on Rapture. Cash says I ream it too much. But it makes me float.”

  “I’m no hallucination.” Connie felt like giggling. It was so weird to be reassuring somebody else. “Feel me!”