Woman on the Edge of Time

by Marge Piercy

  The door opened suddenly with a swoosh, and a man barged in. He was close to seven feet tall, completely hairless as far as she could see. He wore a shiny gray-blue uniform and his voice as he barked at her was extremely deep, beyond the ordinary human range, with strange overtones in it that made her stomach clutch. Fear gripped her through the belly. She had to do the easercises Luciente had taught her, she had to become conscious of her breathing and relax. “Who are you? Remain still. Answer correctly.”

  “My name is Connie and I’m time traveling. I guess you were listening to us?”

  “There is no such thing as time travel. You will be scanned. And you will be sealed in here again,” the man said to Gildina. “We’ll deal with you later. She’s a dud, but you talked with her for one hour.”

  Gildina began to blubber. “Well, how could she get in here if you didn’t let her? I thought it was a special project. Everybody before the great split, they were all duds and woolies. Everybody knows that! How could she get in if you didn’t let her in?”

  “That’s not your problem. You’re for the organ bank now,” he said with savage glee in his strange, artificially deep voice. “You, come.” His hand bruised Connie’s arm, biting in.

  “I can only stay here through her. Gildina has a special mental power, even if she doesn’t know it.”

  “Incorrect. She was born a dud. She’s just a built-up contracty. All duds have brain deficiencies from protein scarcity in fetus and early childhood. Their IRP’s are negative forty to negative fifteen. Her psych scan tests show negative twenty-five. She has no more mental capacity than a genetically improved ape.”

  “She’s still receptive. I guess you don’t measure that! I homed in on her. Break my contact with her and I disappear.” It was wonderful to feel so confident facing a sort of cop. That’s what he was, supercop, with a weapons belt on his waist and one hand modified into a weapon-tool itself.

  “When we get done playing with you, you will wish you could disappear. And then you will.” A grin of bright enamel teeth, whiter than scrubbed bathroom tiles. “She’s just a chica, exactly like you look to be. Cosmetically fixed for sex use. Like you find in any knockshop.”

  “How would you know?” Gildina drew herself up in fussy, impotent fury. “What would you do in a knockshop? You don’t even have the equipment.”

  “No appendix either.” The guard grinned his mirthless flashing white smile. “That’s why we don’t need many of you useless cunts now-on. Nothing inessential. Pure, functional, reliable. We embody the ideal. We can be destroyed—not by you duds—but never verted, never deflected, never distracted. None of us has ever been disloyal to the multi that owns us.”

  Connie asked, “What’s a multi?”

  He looked shocked now, serious. “The multi is everything.”

  “What does ‘multi’ stand for?”

  “For what is,” he said hollowly.

  “Like states, countries?”

  “That was before,” Gildina said. “Multis own everybody—”

  “Was irrational,” the guard said. “Overlapping jurisdictions. Now we all belong to a corporate body. Multis. Like that contracty soon to be dismantled into the organ bank, I belong to Chase-World-TT. The multi that owns us.” He bowed his head briefly. Then his head jerked upright, his eyes narrowed. “Why are you not afraid?”

  She was trying to work her arm loose without success. His metal grip dug into her skin. “How do you know I’m not scared?”

  “My sensing devices monitor your outputs. I reg adrenaline but no sympathetic nervous system involvement. You feel anger but not fear?” The hand squeezed harder. “A dud could not react so, after coring and behavior mod. You have no monitor implant. Are you on a drug I cannot scan? Not acetylcholine. Something is wrong. You look me in the eyes, unlike a fem. All duds are brain damaged and modded. Therefore you’re only disguised as a dud!” His other hand groped toward his belt.

  She decided she’d better vanish. Shutting her eyes, she let go of Gildina and tried to shove off. But his grip still ate into her arm. Come on, come on! She pushed with her mind, pushed against the metal grip. She fixed her mind on her own bed—that she should ever call a hospital bed her own! She thrust herself roughly back, and the grip began to fade.

  Dizzy, sweating from every pore, she lay on her back in bed. Sybil, Tina, and Valente were leaning over her. Her arm hurt. Her head ached horribly. She was being punished for the anger she had felt; that thing in her head was punishing her with sharp pain and spurts of dulling drug. She felt her head was going to break open like a coconut struck with a hammer. She could feel the line where her skull was about to split.

  She would not answer them, but seeing she was conscious, Valente left. She winked at Sybil and Tina then, who stared at her, puzzled but relieved. Connie had to lie back, breathe deeply, relax herself. So that was the other world that might come to be. That was Luciente’s war, and she was enlisted in it.

  SIXTEEN

  Connie was an object. She went where placed and stayed there. She caught the phrase “passive aggressive” from Acker to his girlfriend Miss Moynihan. Exactly, she thought. You got it, Waggle-Beard—now run with it. She would not get up until gotten up. She ate only if fed. She sat in a chair when placed there and got up when hauled up.

  Although she was proud of time traveling on her own, she was afraid to try again. She did not want to end up in that other future. All the time the drug leaking into her head was clogging her, slowing her, and whenever she got angry, her head turned her off. Something hurt in her then; a dreadful anxiety out of nowhere beset her with a small seizure and she had to remain still. Covertly she watched the ward and learned what she could about the hospital.

  She felt distanced from her own life, as if it had ended with the implantation of the dialytrode. She could not resume her life, Therefore Connie was no more. Yet she lived on. Detached, wakeful, brooding inside the heaviness of the drug, she kept still. She had given up smoking. For the first time in her life she stopped smoking. The craving for a cigarette was a left-over itch from being Connie. At least it kicked up sand on the desert of the hours, that old itch.

  She could never guess when Dolly would appear. A couple of times her niece promised she was coming and never showed up, and then without warning she sailed in, bright as a parakeet, sharply dressed in something new with her hair that gaudy red, her sunglasses on, her hands wet with the perspiration of speed. The staff encouraged Dolly to come because Connie talked to her. Dolly slipped her money but would not bring Nita. When she asked about Nita, Dolly’s answers were vague. “She’s doing all right, all right. Just fine.”

  Nita’s birthday approached, the fifteenth of October. Connie begged Dolly to buy a present for her. Something preciosa. Pretty little slippers with bunnies, a soft animal with plush fur. Dolly promised, but Connie had no way to pin her down. The next time Dolly flashed in, she said Nita had had a lovely birthday. Mamá had given her a party with a cake with candles and ice cream. So Carmel still had Nita.

  Connie’s tongue spoke before she could stop herself. “Dolly, it’s you who needs Nita. Sure, your mamá takes good care. But you need her with you. Without her, you don’t love yourself. You use yourself like a rag to wipe up the streets. You turn your body to money, and the money to the buzzing of death in your head.”

  “I’m doing fine, Connie, real fine. Listen, Daddy and Adele say they’re coming to see you. How about that?”

  “Sin duda. The day it rains money on Harlem.”

  “Fíjate, I brought you some perfume. And here’s for you to get some coffee, a little something from the canteen.” Dolly kissed her cheek and pressed a wadded-up five into her palm. “Smell the perfume, it’s the real thing. Arpege cologne. Nice, huh? It came in a set with the perfume. Splash some on now. Nice? You smell like a rose. I kept the perfume, you couldn’t hold cm to it here, the staff would swipe it A john gave it to me. He has a drugstore in Teaneck, he says he’s the manager.”

/>   “Dolly, you’re so thin. Do you eat at all?”

  “You lost weight too. The both of us. With your hair done where I get mine, you’ll look ten years younger, Connie. I’ll treat you to it when you get out Very short hair is in. I make money hand over fist now, you’ll see. You like the Arpege? It’s good to be thin, it’s chic” She pronounced it “cheek.” “When you get out, you’ll be all better and you’ll get yourself a man in no time. But that wig is ratty! How come they give you such a stupid wig? I’ll get you a good one, human hair.”

  “Dolly, don’t fuss about the wig. Please get me out of here! Let me come and visit you.”

  “Okay, Connie, not to worry. You’ll look great I’ll send you to my hairdresser. It’s good you lost weight, and without taking pills even! But that wig, it makes you look like a jíbara! I’ll get you a better wig so you won’t be ashamed.” Dolly kissed her. “I had something to give you. What was it? Some perfume …”

  Her arms where Dolly had splashed the cologne smelled like her old caseworker, Mrs. Polcari. One case unloaded. Maybe she had had a bit of a crush on Mrs. Polcari, at the same time that she resented her youth at the age they shared, her job, her money, her home, her children, her air of being gently but firmly at all times right. She felt sophisticated thinking so about her caseworker; Luciente’s influence. Maybe she had wanted to eat Mrs. Polcari with a long spoon, like an ice cream sundae, a pineapple sundae with whipped cream and a cherry. Back in her life before they had made her their monster.

  Suppose they said she could trade lives? But who would want hers? Only somebody like Dr. Redding would buy her at auction, cheap by the dozen along with five thousand chimpanzees. Now she was a chimp who smelled of Arpege. Probably the cologne would be stolen. In spite of this being a locked ward, people went in and out all day—doctors and researchers besides the staff, orderlies and aides, volunteers who filtered through the whole hospital, students, graduate students, residents, interns, the chief resident, Argent’s assistant director of research, patients’ visitors, technicians, even a patient from another ward who flitted in to sputter quickly to Tina that she was dying of cancer but nobody would believe it.

  A clam in a green chair, she sat in the day room, unmoving, and all the gossip of the ward trickled through her sore mind. Somewhere in this fund of trivial bits of garbage smelling of rotting shrimp and brown lettuce must be some clue on how to find herself again, how to fight. She sat facing the bronze plaque on the wall that said the ward was named for Mrs. John Sturgiss Baylor. Baylor was Dr. Argent’s middle name. Actually it was his mother’s name, Valente said. His first wife was dead too, and his second, Elinor, was in her late thirties—a hearty good-looking woman who seemed oddly transparent. Connie could never remember in between her appearances what she looked like. She seemed entirely beige and honey-colored and she would come marching rapidly through the ward for some momentary consultation with Dr. Argent, striding as if across a tennis court and looking at no one, cheerful enough and utterly indifferent to them all. She was the only wife who ever came into the hospital. She was on some committee that had to do with fund raising and managing volunteers. Finally at some point she began to speak to Dr. Redding when she encountered him, giving a measured smile, but she never greeted Dr. Morgan.

  Dr. Morgan had married a nurse who stayed home with their children in Rye. Nurse Roditis liked her and they had long conversations on the phone, about Dr. Morgan and his temper and his vanities and whether he was or was not having an affair with a ward secretary named Pauline. Connie found it hard to imagine Dr. Morgan having an affair with anyone, but it sounded like he was meaninglessly but frequently unfaithful, like a nervous twitch.

  But patients and staff had no gossip about Dr. Redding, who had four children and had always been married to the same wife nobody had ever seen. More was known about his kids, because he talked about them. Chaz Junior was doing his residency in urology. Betsey was married, expecting. John was studying physics. Karen, the youngest, he was bitter about He said she was spoiled and he made her go to a psychiatrist. She had run away from home, from school, from him.

  Patients and staff talked over the doctors constantly. What could she make of this coffee grounds of gossip? That Redding’s family had a ski and summer house in Vermont and everybody commuted back and forth except him usually. That Dr. Argent was an Episcopalian and was always hurrying to a banquet or a fund-raising dinner for a senator or a wedding that would be in the Times. Elinor cared for neither New York summers nor New York winters, and Dr. Redding thought Dr. Argent took too many vacations.

  Dr. Redding wanted Dr. Argent to invite him to some annual get-together, some bunch of men who went up to his family’s old hunting lodge in the Adirondacks to shoot at birds or deer or whatever they shot at. Dr. Redding didn’t want to go because he liked to shoot things. He didn’t seem to like anything except his work. He wanted to go because of the men who would be there drinking and shooting. Dr. Morgan admired and envied Dr. Redding, as Dr. Redding envied but did not admire Dr. Argent. Dr. Morgan was a nervous sneak who clung to the rules on the job, who loved procedures and methodology and other such words. Dr. Redding loved power and the feeling of success. He said Dr. Argent liked too much to be a man about town. She had no idea what Dr. Argent might have loved, but he was nervous now at the brink of retirement to carry off some final prize. Redding had an ulcer, Argent had a heart condition, and Morgan lied to his wife about where he spent his evenings.

  Tuesday as she was being taken to the bathroom, suddenly she felt Luciente in her like a scream. Luciente came through her like a great wound ripping open that knocked her to the floor of the ward. Then Luciente was gone. Yet she felt an after-aura of Luciente’s presence. She knew her friend had been with her, there like lightning and gone. The attendant picked her up.

  After supper she lay down while the patients were still moving around and talking, while the lights were still on all over the ward, while the laughter of the television set sounded like the pins going down in a bowling alley. She and Eddie had lived at first next door to a bowling alley in the Bronx; oh, maybe twenty blocks from Carmel’s apartment and beauty shop. She had been pregnant in that apartment: she remembered lying in the bed with the hollow rattling thunder of the bowling alley coming through the wall … . She felt Luciente approaching again. Again it was a wild careening approach, full of pain, and almost she resisted in fear; but what should she fear from Luciente? Something must be wrong. She had to find out. She went with the wave of pain, pushing over, and found herself hugging Luciente.

  Luciente’s face was set with tears, twisted with agony.

  “What’s wrong? What is it?”

  “Person is dead!”

  “Who? Who’s dead?”

  “Jackrabbit,” Bee said behind her, laying his big hand on her shoulder.

  “You heard today? When I felt you in my mind for a moment?”

  “I didn’t know I’d touched your mind,” Luciente mumbled in a low, weary voice. “I did so now because Bee suggested you might want to attend the wake.” Gently Luciente disengaged herself and stood apart, her shoulders bent.

  She touched Luciente’s cheek. “I’m glad you sent for me. Yes. I want to be with you.”

  “We feel you’re family,” Bee said. “We thought you should share, if you wished.”

  “I heard today,” Luciente said, and began to weep again. “It happened yesterday.” She turned away shaking. Her hands clawed the air. Her back arched on itself and seemed to collapse. Bee caught her. She struck at him, writhed, twisted back and clutched him, pressing her face into his chest.

  Bee held Luciente until she had stopped shaking and then started her walking, his arm supporting her. “Come. To the meetinghouse. The wake will start.”

  “Is he … Do you have the body?”

  “Yes, Jackrabbit was brought by dipper this afternoon and we laid the body out. The mems, we wept over Jackrabbit this afternoon. Now it’s time for everyone.”

/>   The room was round and about half the size it had been for the holi. Most of the younger people were sitting on mats, blankets, cushions on the floor, while the older people sat on chairs. The room was full by the time they came in and went toward the center of the circle, where Bolivar sat on the floor beside the body, his back like a flagpole. Jackrabbit lay on a board across trestles with a woolen blanket of light and dark blues thrown over him, woven in patterns of rabbits and ferns. Only his head showed. His eyes had been closed and his face wore a strange grimace, but it was obviously him: obviously Jackrabbit, obviously dead. He looked deader than the embalmed corpses of her own time, her mother painted garishly as a whore in the funeral parlor, shockingly made up.

  Globes of light stood at his head and feet. Around him objects were arranged like children’s offerings: worn boots, clothing, a leather cap, a wide straw hat woven of rushes in a sea gull emblem, drawings, a pocketknife, carefully arranged piles of papers and cartridges, shiny cubes, a pillow, a woolen poncho, an intaglio belt buckle on a carefully worked leather belt, a few books, letters, a ring with a yellow stone. From what she knew of Mattapoisett, she guessed she was looking at the complete worldly goods of Jackrabbit, arranged around him in the dimly lit room.

  All her family had gathered now in the innermost circle: Luciente, Bee, Barbarossa, Morningstar, Sojourner, Hawk, Dawn, Otter, Luxembourg, everyone except Barbarossa’s baby. She felt a strange shifting as if her internal earth quaked. What did she mean by calling them family? Well, something warm. They had called her to share their sorrow. They were the closest family she had now.

  Everybody around her was wearing those ceremonial robes, long dresses. Bolivar, two other young people, three of middle age, and one very old also sat in the inner circle of mourners. Some people began serving coffee in ceramic mugs. Red Star, the yellow-haired mechanic, poured hot savory coffee for them before the general serving began and returned as everyone else was served to offer more to anyone who wished.