by Greg Bear
She lifted the phone from its cradle.
“He had another stroke, Ma. They don’t know if he’s going to wake up.” Jane was crying. Millie tried to comfort her, feeling absurd in doing so. How could she explain that she had already begun mourning George as she had picked the buttons of his pajama top off the floor?
“Hang on, Janie,” Millie said. “We’ll be there as soon as we can. I have to wait for Raymond to come back inside.”
She hung up and leaned against the doorframe. From the kitchen doorway, she saw into the den. George’s childhood desk stood in a dark corner beside the stairs; he had brought it back to the house after his mother’s death in 1969. Funny, the things that become background, beneath notice. She hadn’t given that desk a second thought in years.
The writing surface swung upward on protesting hinges, revealing layers of children’s hidden treasures: a princess doll from some Disney movie or another, a metal car, a comic book, some foreign coins, the joke wrappers from several pieces of Bazooka gum. Beneath three generations of lost toys, she discovered something else: a piece of plywood. It took her some effort to pry loose the false bottom.
Inside, she found a small leather-bound notebook of the type George had carried when they first met. George had signed and dated the inside of the front cover, 1931. Each page was filled with diagrams. Castles, skyscrapers, scaled city maps, all done in a more fanciful version of George’s trained hand. Everything he had put away of himself, bound into one sketchbook.
In retrospect, Millie was able to look back on that single trip and the confession in the upper branches of the sycamore as a turning point. They climbed down as the sun rose, dressed the children, drove downtown to run some errands, went to Hutzler’s for an early lunch and a belated birthday present for Jane. Life seemed back to normal. Millie put George’s upset out of her mind over shrimp salad on cheese toast. Later there were other conversations, bigger battles. It was easy enough to say in hindsight that George had become different overnight, but by the time she noticed, the changes had already taken root. By the time she noticed, the architect was gone.
The man who replaced him was similar in most ways, but without any hint of boyishness. The only remnant of the child who had sketched skyscrapers was in his work on the treehouse; he still mustered enthusiasm when planning something with Charlie and Jane. He ceased to bring designs home from the office at all.
“Work can stay at work,” he said.
She was baffled that someone who still poured so much of himself into a project for his children had stopped putting anything into his occupation. She watched as he was passed over for promotion after promotion, never progressing beyond junior partner at any of the firms he worked for.
“They wanted me to work overtime,” he’d say after leaving another job. Or, “They wanted me to travel.”
“So travel! The kids are old enough that I can manage for a few days on my own.”
He just shook his head. It was as if he knew every trick for self-promotion and then set about sabotaging himself. Millie didn’t complain. When money was tight, when Jane needed braces or when a storm blew the roof off the garage, Millie found work. She tried not to resent the change. Whatever it was the other architects had that drove them to create no longer seemed to be a part of George. He designed bland suburban houses, and later strip malls and office parks. The high-rises and mansions and museums went to other, more ambitious draftsmen.
“Show me your designs,” she begged him. “The projects you want to work on.”
“They’re only buildings,” he said, shrugging. This time it was true.
“A new subdivision?” She tried to ask in a way that sounded excited.
“Yes. A whole neighborhood, but just three different house designs.”
“Are you designing all of them?”
“No, I’m in charge of the four bedroom, but I have to work with another fellow so that they look like they came from the same brain.”
“You’re very talented, you know.” She said this as often as possible without sounding trite. “I wish you would get a chance to make all those things you used to talk about.”
He laughed and turned away from the drafting table. “You’re sweet to say so, but it’s not art. It’s just my job. I make what they want me to make.”
When the wives of the firm’s partners mentioned their husbands’ latest endeavors, she smiled and volunteered nothing. If he didn’t want to be an artist, he didn’t have to be, but she couldn’t understand how he took pride in his draftsmanship and dismissed it at the same time. Try as she might, she was unable to put her finger on what exactly he had lost. How could she complain about a man who helped with the dishes every night, who read to the children, who taught them to measure twice and cut once? She tried to encourage him, but he turned everything around.
“Why don’t you get another degree?” he asked one day, after the children had both started high school. “You’ve always wanted to learn more about your plants.”
She did it, half hoping to motivate him again as well. She had a master’s degree and a doctorate in botany by the time she realized she would never goad him into competing with her. He let her take over his office and his drafting table when she needed them for her garden designs. He corrected others when they assumed he was the doctor in the family, and spoke of her accomplishments, but never said a word about his own. When she tried to brag to others about his work, he responded with self-deprecation. She hated herself for wishing him to be anything other than what he had become, and worked on loving him for the person that he was. He was a match that refused to ignite; she felt selfish for wanting him to burn brightly.
Over time, it ceased to matter as much. Her career bloomed, and she learned not to press him about his. The children grew up and left and came back and left and had children of their own. In retirement she found him to be much easier company. She enjoyed watching his comfortable way with the grandchildren and great-grandchildren, and loved it when he began to design new tree house additions for the new generations.
She wasn’t sure if it was fair to judge anyone by the man he had been in his twenties. The person you marry is not the same person you grow old with. She was sure he could say the same thing about her. She was sorry it had taken her so long to learn that, to stop pushing him, but that was probably the way of it.
Raymond drove her to the hospital, then returned to the house. “I’m onto something,” he said, kissing her on the forehead and dashing out again. Millie watched reruns from the straight-backed chair beside George’s bed. Jane and Charlie took turns beside her, occasionally slipping out to talk in the hallway. She thought she heard Charlie say “retirement community” at least twice.
She let the TV distract her. Every man on television seemed to be an architect. Every sitcom and every movie, from the Brady Bunch on, seemed to feature some young man with blueprints and skyscraper dreams. Why was that? It was artsy but manly, she supposed. Sensitive without being soft. A perfect occupation for a man with a creative side who also wanted to support his family, at least until the day he decided he didn’t want to do it anymore. That didn’t seem to happen on television.
Raymond arrived back late in the evening, the glow of success evident in his face. It only took him a moment to convince his mother and uncle to go grab some dinner before the cafeteria closed.
“I think I found what you were looking for, Grandma.” It was amazing how much he looked like a young George when he smiled. Taller, thankfully for him, and with a strange lop-sided haircut, but with the same rakish confidence that she had so admired. She returned the smile. She hadn’t really thought there would be anything to find, but it had been worth a shot.
“There are a bunch of compartments all over the tree house, but most of them are still filled with toys and baseball cards and stuff. Anyway, I remembered that one time my cousin Joseph was chasing me ’cause he wanted my Steve Austin action figure. I didn’t know where to put it that he
wouldn’t find it. I was almost to the top when I realized that the metal struts that support the crow’s nest are hollow, if you have something to pry them open with. I had my pocket knife with me. The first one I opened had something wedged in it, so I stashed Steve Austin in the second one until Joseph went home. Never thought to look at what was in that first one until now.”
With a flourish, he produced a blueprint tube from behind his back. “I opened it to make sure there was something in it—there is—but I didn’t look at what’s inside.”
She tried to keep her voice from quavering. She hoped the others would stay away from the room a little longer. “Shall we?”
Ray slid the rolled paper out, laying the drawing across George’s legs.
“George, we’re looking at the blueprints you hid.” She thought it was only fair to explain what was going on.
This was the same prison he had drawn on the butcher paper. Done on proper drafting paper, and more detailed, but still with an unfinished quality. He wouldn’t have been allowed to bring the actual plans home; he must have sketched it again later. Her eye roved the paper, trying to understand the nuances of the horrible place. She had seen enough of George’s plans that they rose from the paper as fully formed buildings in her mind.
“It’s the same,” she said, but as she said it, she caught the flaw that she had missed in the cruder drawing. She looked closer, but there was no mistaking it. In this all-seeing prison, a small blind spot. To her knowledge, George had never made an error on a blueprint. Had he done the same thing on the original? Had anyone else noticed, in the engineering or the construction? She had no way of knowing if this sketch was true to the thing that had been built, or if he had changed the design in retrospect. She could still only guess at what to say to ease his mind.
Millie leaned over to kiss George’s stubbled cheek. She whispered in his ear. “Maybe you did it, old man. Maybe you gave them a chance.”
Jane spent the drive home updating her mother on her own work and the escapades of various children and grandchildren. Millie lost track, but appreciated the diversion. When they got to the house, her daughter headed straight for the kitchen.
“Tea?” Jane was already picking up the kettle.
“Tea would be wonderful,” Millie agreed, before excusing herself to the bedroom.
She crossed the room in the dark and opened the French doors, letting the winter air inside. She had never tired of this view, not in any season. Tonight, the light of the full moon reflected off the snow and disappeared in Raymond’s footprints. The naked branches of the sycamore were long white fingers outlined in light; they performed benedictions over the empty platforms of the tree house.
Millie stepped through the doorway and onto the patio. The drifts were nearly up to her knees. She took two more steps, toward the tree. The cold made her eyes water.
She wished she could go back to that night in 1951, ask George what he had done and how she might share his burden. She was too late for so much. She allowed herself to grieve it all for a moment: her husband, their life together, the things they had shared and the things they had held back. It surrounded her like the cold, filling up the space expelled by her breath, until she fixed her eyes again on the treehouse. Everything missing from the body in the hospital was still here. The Georgeness.
“Oh,” she whispered, as the day hit her.
“I won’t leave,” she said to the tree. Raymond would help her, maybe, or she would hire someone who would. The lights continued to dance after she had made her way back inside. They danced behind her eyelids when she closed her eyes.
Millie remembered the dream house that George used to promise her, back when this was a passing-through place, not their home. She was suddenly glad he had never gotten the chance to build it, that he had instead devoted himself to countless iterations of one mad project. Even the best plans get revised.
In the morning, there were pamphlets for a retirement village on the kitchen table.
Jane looked apologetic. “Charlie says we should talk about your options.”
“I know my options,” Millie said, setting a mug down on one of the smiling silver-haired faces.
She refused to let Jane help with the briefcase she carried with her to the hospital. When they got to George’s room, she sent Charlie and Jane to get breakfast.
“I’d like some time with my husband,” she said.
Then they were alone again, alone except for the noisy machines by the bedside and the ticking clock and the television and the nurses’ station outside the door. None of that was hard to tune out.
“We’re going to draw again, old man.”
She opened the briefcase and pulled out a drawing board, a piece of paper, and a handful of pencils. She managed to angle a chair so that she was leaning half on the bed. George’s hand closed around the pencil when she placed it against his palm. All the phantom energy of two days previous was gone. Her movement now led his, both of her hands clasped around his left.
He was the draftsman, but she knew plants. They started with the roots. She guided him through the shape of the tree, through the shape of his penance. Through every branch they both knew by heart, through every platform she had seen from her vantage point in the garden. The firehouse pole, the puppet theater, the Rapunzel tower. The crow’s nest, which had kept his secret. Finally, around the treehouse, they started on her plans for the spring’s gardens. All that mattered was his hand pressed in hers: long enough to feel like always, long enough to feel like everything trapped had been set free.
NEBULA AWARD NOMINEE
BEST NOVELETTE
“THE LITIGATION MASTER AND THE MONKEY KING”
KEN LIU
Ken Liu has won a Nebula Award, a World Fantasy Award, and two Hugos. “The Litigation Master and the Monkey King” appeared in Lightspeed.
The tiny cottage at the edge of Sanli Village—away from the villagers’ noisy houses and busy clan shrines and next to the cool pond filled with lily pads, pink lotus flowers, and playful carp—would have made an ideal romantic summer hideaway for some dissolute poet and his silk-robed mistress from nearby bustling Yangzhou.
Indeed, having such a country lodge was the fashion among the literati in the lower Yangtze region in this second decade of the glorious reign of the Qianlong Emperor. Everyone agreed—as they visited each other in their vacation homes and sipped tea—that he was the best Emperor of the Qing Dynasty: so wise, so vigorous, and so solicitous of his subjects! And as the Qing Dynasty, founded by Manchu sages, was without a doubt the best dynasty ever to rule China, the scholars competed to compose poems that best showed their gratitude for having the luck to bear witness to this golden age, gift of the greatest Emperor who ever lived.
Alas, any scholar interested in this cottage must be disappointed for it was decrepit. The bamboo grove around it was wild and unkempt; the wooden walls crooked, rotting, and full of holes; the thatching over the roof uneven, with older layers peeking out through holes in the newer layers—not unlike the owner and sole inhabitant of the cottage, actually. Tian Haoli was in his fifties but looked ten years older. He was gaunt, sallow, his queue as thin as a pig’s tail, and his breath often smelled of the cheapest rice wine and even cheaper tea. An accident in youth lamed his right leg, but he preferred to shuffle slowly rather than using a cane. His robe was patched all over, though his under-robe still showed through innumerable holes.
Unlike most in the village, Tian knew how to read and write, but as far as anyone knew, he never passed any level of the Imperial Examinations. From time to time, he would write a letter for some family or read an official notice in the teahouse in exchange for half a chicken or a bowl of dumplings.
But that was not how he really made his living.
The morning began like any other. As the sun rose lazily, the fog hanging over the pond dissipated like dissolving ink. Bit by bit, the pink lotus blossoms, the jade-green bamboo stalks, and the golden-yellow cottage roof emerged
from the fog.
Knock, knock.
Tian stirred but did not wake up. The Monkey King was hosting a banquet, and Tian was going to eat his fill.
Ever since Tian was a little boy, he has been obsessed with the exploits of the Monkey King, the trickster demon who had seventy-two transformations and defeated hundreds of monsters, who had shaken the throne of the Jade Emperor with a troop of monkeys.
And Monkey liked good food and loved good wine, a must in a good host.
Knock, Knock.
Tian ignored the knocking. He was about to bite into a piece of drunken chicken dipped in four different exquisite sauces—
You going to answer that? Monkey said.
As Tian grew older, Monkey would visit him in his dreams, or, if he was awake, speak to him in his head. While others prayed to the Goddess of Mercy or the Buddha, Tian enjoyed conversing with Monkey, who he felt was a demon after his own heart.
Whatever it is, it can wait, said Tian.
I think you have a client, said Monkey.
Knock-knock-knock—
The insistent knocking whisked away Tian’s chicken and abruptly ended his dream. His stomach growled, and he cursed as he rubbed his eyes.
“Just a moment!” Tian fumbled out of bed and struggled to put on his robe, muttering to himself all the while. “Why can’t they wait till I’ve woken up properly and pissed and eaten? These unlettered fools are getting more and more unreasonable . . . I must demand a whole chicken this time . . . It was such a nice dream . . .”
I’ll save some plum wine for you, said Monkey.
You better.
Tian opened the door. Li Xiaoyi, a woman so timid that she apologized even when some rambunctious child ran into her, stood there in a dark green dress, her hair pinned up in the manner prescribed for widows. Her fist was lifted and almost smashed into Tian’s nose.
“Aiya!” Tian said. “You owe me the best drunk chicken in Yangzhou!” But Li’s expression, a combination of desperation and fright, altered his tone. “Come on in.”