What I Didn't See and Other Stories

by Karen Joy Fowler

  What ruler in what land in what era has ever done otherwise? Name me one president, elected by and acting for us, who hasn't promised that we'll have peace just as soon as he's done killing people. Sixteen million soldiers (many of them killers themselves) dead in the Great War. Does anyone know why?

  Does anyone believe we are done?

  Besides, Tu-api was sorry. I'd been wrong to think that was longing in her face when it was clearly remorse. She'd wanted company in death, but that hadn't worked out. Was it possible she now wanted company in some unending world of guilt?

  I found it easier to think Miss Whitfield was to blame than that Tu-api wished me ill. I'd begun to carry the print of her face in my pocket so I could pull it out and look at it whenever I was alone. I would sit on the dirt by her coffin and stare until her beautiful face floated up out of the darkness and we were, for a moment, together.

  * * * *

  One night, walking back to my bedroom as silently as possible, I nearly collided with Mallick in the central hallway. He was wearing a nightshirt that left his saggy old knees bare. “Going to the lavatory,” he explained unnecessarily, so that I knew it was true what Patwin had told me, that he'd been in the woman's wing, visiting Miss Jackson. I tried not to judge her for it, but really, what comfort could sleeping with Mallick have been?

  "Me, too,” I said with an equal lack of conviction.

  We stood a moment, carefully not meeting each other's eyes. “So Miss Whitfield leaves tomorrow,” Mallick offered finally. “She's been a lively addition.” I realized then that he thought I'd been visiting Miss Whitfield. As if that wouldn't be worth your life!

  A woman's face appeared in a doorway, white and sudden.

  When my heart began beating again, I recognized Miss Whitfield. She didn't speak, merely noted my suspicious, nighttime rambling, my covert meeting with Mallick, and disappeared as quickly as she'd come, no doubt to write it all down before she forgot. “Taking my pictures,” she called it once, as if what she did and what I did were the same, as if her imposed judgments could be compared to my dispassionate records. If I'd wanted to murder her, this would have been my last opportunity. Not that I wanted to murder her. Plus Mallick had seen me; I'd never get away with it. I went to my room and into a night of troubled dreams.

  Miss Whitfield left the next morning. At Patwin's insistence, I took a group picture before she went. Patwin was always reminding me to document the work as well as the artifacts. “Take some pictures of live people today,” he would say, fingering his beard with that annoying scratching sound. “Take some pictures of me."

  Everyone lined up in the expedition house courtyard, staring into the morning sun. Miss Whitfield was so eager to leave that she couldn't stand still and ruined two exposures before I got one that showed her clearly. It's a formal portrait; no one is touching anyone else in our strained little arrangement of bodies.

  "Was there a curse on Tu-api's tomb?” Miss Whitfield had asked us shortly after her arrival. According to the newspapers, Carter had a curse; it was one more way in which we disappointed. Though Mallick, who had his own sources, said no one could find the actual site or text of Carter's curse. Other tombs had them, so, of course, Carter couldn't be expected to do without.

  The very day Carter found the entrance to Tut-ankh-Amen's tomb, a cobra ate his pet canary. “Some curse,” Patwin scoffed when we read this, but Davis reminded us how canaries in mines died just to warn you death was coming for you next. And sure enough, last week, we had a telegram from Lord Wallis that Lord Carnarvon, who sponsored Carter's dig, had suddenly died in Cairo. The cause was indeterminate, but might have been a fever carried by an insect bite on his cheek. Back in England his dog had also died—this curse was most unkind to pets.

  It was the dog that put Miss Whitfield over the top. She cared little for mountains of copper, gold, and ebony. She was, as Patwin had noted, being nothing but fair, no materialist. But she did love a suspicious death. She left us for Egypt just as quick as an invitation could be wrangled and transport arranged.

  I believe we were all a bit disappointed to realize that none of us was to be the murderer or victim in her next book. All those murderous thoughts I'd obligingly had, all the probing we'd withstood, all the petty disputes we'd engaged in, all for nothing. The one to reap the benefit would, of course, be Carter.

  We stood at the entry to the expedition house and waved. She was turned around to us, her face in the car window, smaller and smaller until it and then the car that carried her vanished entirely. “A dangerous woman,” Patwin said.

  "A terrible eater,” said Ferhid. His tone was venomous. “A picky eater."

  "I can't put my finger on exactly what it was about her,” said Miss Jackson. “But there were times when she was watching us, taking notes on everything we said and did, as if she knew what we really meant and we didn't—there were times when I could have happily strangled her."

  So we were all glad to see the last of her. It didn't mean she wasn't missed. It was hard to go back to how we'd been before; it was hard to stop being irritated with everyone just because she wasn't there asking us to be. There was a space left that no one else would fit inside. Ferhid kept setting her plate at the table for three days after she'd gone.

  * * * *

  I've tried to tell all this as carefully as I could. Davis with the sunlight flashing off his spectacles. Miss Whitfield dipping her hand in the fountain. Mallick in his nightshirt. Ferhid's smile. Miss Jackson kneeling before God's face in the clouds. All that happened. All that was real. I'd rather you looked at that instead of at me. And yet here I am.

  Some people are sensitive to exposure and some aren't. Miss Whitfield left her mark on me, but took no mark in return. Miss Whitfield was the sort of person who could touch Tu-api's skull, undisturbed, as it had been for centuries, and even move it and still not be changed by doing so. Me, I've always been the sensitive sort.

  The night after Miss Whitfield's departure I went again to Tu-api's tomb. The silhouette of the ruined ziggurat shone in the moonlight. There was the hum of bugs; a dog barked sleepily in the distance; my footsteps thudded in the dust. The wind was cool and carried the smell of cooked chicken. My relief was enormous. The only reason I'd thought of murdering Miss Whitfield was that she was an awful woman who often talked about murder. There was nothing supernatural at work here; it was all perfectly normal, and everyone had felt the same.

  The moon had risen, round as an opened rose. I walked away from it into the perfect darkness of the tomb. I owed Tu-api an apology. How could I ever have thought, even for a minute, that she'd curse me into murder? I begged for her forgiveness. It was the first time I'd spoken to her aloud.

  She was not the only one listening. Gossipy Mallick had apparently told Patwin his suspicions regarding me and Miss Whitfield, and Patwin, being more discerning and trained to read puzzles far older and more mysterious than I, came upon the truth of it. He'd followed me, and when I spoke, he was the one who responded. “What's this about?” he asked, and what could I possibly say?

  "You can't be coming here anymore at night by yourself.” Patwin stepped toward me. “You can't be thinking this way.” He took me by the arm. “Come back to bed."

  I let him lead me over the moonlit dust to the expedition house. As we went, he analyzed my errors. I was guilty of romanticism, of individualism. I was guilty of ancestor worship. I had entertained the superstition of an ancient, powerful curse. I wasn't even bourgeois; I had barely made it to primitive.

  There was no need to lecture me. I knew all those things. He put me to bed as if he were my mother, sitting beside me for a while, pretending nothing was wrong with me, just the way my mother had pretended. “You need a girlfriend,” he suggested. “It's too bad Miss Whitfield has gone. It's too bad Miss Jackson is already spoken for."

  I stopped listening. I'd just realized something about myself, something so unlikely, so unexpected, that no one would ever have guessed it. I myself woul
d never have guessed it. Mother would never have guessed it, and she would be so surprised when she found out. The thing I realized was this: I was the sort of person who would do anything for love.

  I'd never felt so joyful, so alive. Who could call that a curse? I'd never felt so serene. Mr. Davis or Mr. Patwin? Mallick or Miss Jackson or Ferhid? All or none of the above, and what if I got it wrong? But it had never been my choice to make. What I would do was whatever she asked.

  Poor Patwin. I had only to turn to see his face. He'd believed so firmly in the march of history, it left him blind to the danger in the moment. Poor Miss Whitfield. Served her right, though, choosing Carter over us. How sad she'd be to have missed it all. Poor Miss Jackson. She'd never figured out that the secret is to love someone already dead. Then nothing can happen that doesn't bring the two of you closer together.

  Serenity is, of course, a transitory state, just like living. Whatever Miss Jackson may wish to believe, humans being humans, eternal peace is found only in the grave and not always even there. I'm not telling you anything you don't already know.

  But why spoil things with the long view? Let's leave me there in the moment, flooded with love. Patwin is talking and I am trying to make him happy by agreeing with everything he says. I agree that my infatuation with Tu-api is at an end. I agree that, circumstances being different, I would have considered Miss Jackson or even, God forbid, Miss Whitfield. I agree that when the weather grows too hot and we all go to our separate homes for the summer, I will put serious effort into finding a girlfriend who is alive. I agree that love can be usefully examined with the tool of Marxist analysis. I hand over my photograph and watch Patwin tear it up, both of us pretending there is someplace he can put those pieces where they won't last forever.

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  The Marianas Islands

  A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth

  even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which

  Humanity is always landing.—Oscar Wilde

  Once when I was four or five I asked my grandmother to tell me a secret, some secret thing only grown-ups knew. She thought a moment, then leaned down close to me and whispered. “There are no grown-ups,” she said.

  According to my father, my grandmother was one of those remarkable women who completely reinvented themselves during the seventies. He remembers her as a sort of Betty Crocker figure. She wore lipstick, pumps, and aprons. She put up fruits. One day she metamorphosed into Betty Friedan. She phoned over to him in his dorm room at college. “Mom,” he said. “I've been trying to get you. I need a shirt mended, and I need it by Friday. Can I drop it by?"

  "My sewing basket is in the laundry room,” she said. “Pick a spool that matches the color of the shirt. Knot one end of the thread and put the other end into the needle. Use the smallest needle you can manage. I'm in jail. This is my one phone call. We've agreed to refuse bail. You can get the needle and thread when you go by to feed Angel. It's her night for the Tuna Platter."

  Grams had joined the San Francisco Fairmont sit-in to protest racist hiring policies. She appeared on the news that night, being dragged into the police van; my dad's entire dormitory watched it. Her form, my father always said, was perfect. It was the first of many such phone calls. There was the Vietnam War. There were the nuclear tests. She chained herself to a fence in Nevada. The last wild-water rivers needed to be saved. By the time I was born, my grandmother had an arrest record the size of a Michener novel. One of my earliest memories is of my father, hanging up the phone and reaching for his coat to go and feed Angel, who was by this time an ancient Siamese with a sensitive stomach. “She won't eat if I feed her. You should see the look she gives me.” My father shook his head. “ ‘Methinks the lady doth protest too much.’ “

  Her husband, my grandfather, died before my father's first birthday, shot down in the Pacific, in the battle off Samar. The angriest I ever saw my grandmother was one time when my father suggested that if her husband had been alive, she might not have been quite so unrestrained. “Your father gave his life to make the world a better place,” she said. “So don't you think for one minute he would have minded making his own supper in the same cause."

  I, myself, at five was deeply in love with my grandmother. At sixteen, when I liked no one else, I still made an exception for her. If Grams had ruled the world, the people at my high school would have known how to treat me. You could go to her with problems; her advice was always good. She had the best possible combination of imagination and pragmatism, and she never told you you didn't have a problem when you thought you did.

  I was not the only troubled person who found her serenity and sympathy irresistible. She drew a parade of eccentrics into her parlor, where they played bridge and she played straight man. When I was sixteen and had my wisdom teeth out, I was allowed to recuperate on her couch. I lay under the overhang of her enormous split-leaf philodendron, with Angel2 rumbling against my legs and a knitted afghan made in Grams’ Betty Crocker days wrapped around my shoulders. Out the window the sparrows dipped and shook in the bath.

  The bridge table that day included a British-Indian woman named Dot, who, for reasons of faith, ate nothing but oatmeal and black tea, and a psychic named Sam. Grams’ partner was a man whose name no one knew, but who called himself the Great Unknown. Doped to the gills, I floated in and out of their conversation.

  "Do you think you hear the bullet that gets you?” the Great Unknown asks as I drift away. “I mean in a battle with all the other noise. Do you think you hear the one that's all yours?” He takes a trick, gathering in the cards.

  When I wake up next, Dot is dealing. This is worth waking up for. She ruffles and riffles; the cards fall in a solid sheet from one hand to the other, click satisfyingly onto the table. “But what does normal mean?” the Great Unknown asks, collecting and arranging his hand. “We use the word as if it means something."

  Gram opens with one heart.

  "I don't know anyone normal,” says the Great Unknown. “Do you?"

  "I know people who can pass,” says Sam. “Pass."

  "Three clubs,” says the Great Unknown. “So our polity is based really on deception and hypocrisy. The dishonest dissemblers triumphing over the honestly deranged."

  "So normal is abnormal,” Dot says. “So everyone you know is normal. It's a sort of koan. Pass."

  "Why in the world would you jump to three clubs?” Grams asks the Great Unknown.

  "I know why,” says Sam.

  "Well, of course you do,” Grams says to Sam. “If only you'd use your powers for good instead of evil."

  A little while later I am aware of Grams shuffling. “I don't care if they want to hang suspended by their feet in gas masks and scuba gear,” she says. “In fact, I admire their imagination. I just don't see why they insist on calling it sex."

  I wake up next in tears. The air has the early tint of evening, Angel is gone, and my mouth is full of blood. Up until now, the extractions have been good fun—sleep, and dreams, and narcotics. But the anesthetic is wearing off. There is a pop, pop, pop of pain pulsing in my jaw, and my mouth tastes of the ocean.

  "Do you think you could eat something?” Grams asks, giving me a large pill and a glass of warmish water to chase it down.

  "No.” I am really crying now. “This is awful.” My speech is muffled. I realize I have layers of gauze shoved into the back of my mouth. I pull them out and they are soaked red and smell of sickness.

  Dot and Sam and the Great Unknown crowd around my couch. It's the final scene in The Wizard of Oz. “Don't cry,” says Dot. “We can't bear it.” She strokes my hand open, traces along the lines with a fingernail. “Very good,” she assures me. “Very deep, distinctive lines. Very little confusion in your life."

  "I suppose that's good,” the Great Unknown says doubtfully. “Do you really believe in palmistry?” The Great Unknown prides himself on hardheaded skepticism.

  "I trained in India,” sa
ys Dot.

  While Dot is reading my palm, Sam is reading my mind. “Mind over matter,” he suggests, and then recoils, presumably from what I think of his suggestion.

  I am in such pain, it makes me want to be rude. “I don't believe in palmistry or ESP. I'm so sorry.” I am, of course, no such thing, and Sam knows it.

  "If I was Tinkerbell, you'd be sorry,” says Sam. “Real sorry.” He clears his throat two or three times. “I sense that I'm developing a cough."

  "Here's what I don't believe in,” says the Great Unknown. He ticks them off on his fingers for me. “I don't believe in astrology, numerology, pyramid power. I don't believe in the tooth fairy, sad for you, because you stand to make out well today. I don't believe in God, although I accord him the capital G, as a courtesy to those who do.” He pauses here to nod to Grams, who has always been a churchgoer, then picks right up. “I don't believe in phlogiston, extraterrestrials who abduct you and probe Uranus, the organ box, Silva Mind Control, Scientology"—he has come to the end of his fingers and starts with the first one again—"or witchcraft."

  "Abracadabra,” says Grams, and pulls a red bandanna out of her sleeve for me. I wipe my eyes and blow my nose. The bandanna smells of Grams and her Estee Lauder cologne.

  "I think that our inept government could never keep a secret as big as a CIA-slash-Mafia-slash-Cuban conspiracy to kill JFK,” says the Great Unknown. “Or fake the Moon Landing, although I could be wrong about that one—that one might not be too hard.

  "What I do believe in is the desperate fight against the perils of routine living that they all represent. I believe in each man's need to feel that he has somehow been chosen. It's not everyone who has a submarine.” He fixes Grams with a stern look. “The rest of us must simply make do with Elvis sightings.

  "Life is a series of evasive maneuvers,” he observes in conclusion. “You have to envy anyone with the means to make a clean escape."