by Greg Bear
He fell into the bed and pulled the covers tight about him, eyes closed. He prayed that she would not come after him, not come into his room with her peignoir slipping aside, revealing her furnace body; he prayed her smell would not follow him the rest of his life.
The door to his room did not open. Outside, all was quiet. In time, as dawn fired the roofs and then the walls and finally the streets of Sunside, Oliver slept.
“You came out of your room last night,” Miss Parkhurst said over the late breakfast. Oliver stopped chewing for a moment, glanced at her through bloodshot eyes, then shrugged.
“Did you see what you expected?”
Oliver didn’t answer.
Miss Parkhurst sighed like a young girl. “It’s my life. This is the way I’ve lived for a long time.”
“None of my business,” Oliver said, breaking a roll in half and buttering it.
“Do I disgust you?”
Again no reply. Miss Parkhurst stood in the middle of his silence and walked to the dining room door. She looked over her shoulder at him, eyes moist. “You’re not afraid of me now,” she said. “You think you know what I am.”
Oliver saw that his silence and uncaring attitude hurt her, and relished for a moment this power. When she remained standing in the doorway, he looked up with a purposefully harsh expression—copied from Reggie, sarcastic and angry at once—and saw tears silver her cheeks. She seemed younger than ever, not dangerous—just very sad.
His expression faded. She turned away and closed the door behind her.
Oliver slammed half the roll into his plate of eggs and pushed his chair back from the table. “I’m not yet full-grown!” he shouted at the door. “I’m not even a man! What do you want from me?” He stood and kicked the chair away with his heel, then stuffed his hands in his pockets and paced around the small room. He felt bottled up, and yet she had said he could go anytime he wished.
Go where?
Home?
Did he still want that? He stared at the goldenware and the plates heaped with fine food. Nothing like this at home. Home was a place he sometimes thought he’d have to fight to get away from; he couldn’t protect Momma forever from the rest of the family, couldn’t be a breadwinner for five extra mouths for the rest of his life …
And if he stayed here, knowing what Miss Parkhurst did each night? Could he eat breakfast each morning, knowing how the food had been earned, and all his clothes and books and the piano, too? He really would be a gigolo then.
But this was Sunside. Maybe he could live here, find work, get away from Sleepside for good. The mere thought gave him a twinge. He sat and buried his face in his hands, rubbing his eyes with the tips of his fingers, then pulled at his lids to make a face. He stared at his reflection in the golden carafe, big-nosed, eyes monstrously bleared. He had to talk to Momma. Even talking to Yolanda might help.
But Miss Parkhurst was nowhere to be found. Oliver searched the mansion until dusk, then ate alone in the small dining room. He retired to his room as dark closed in, spreading through the halls like ink through water. To banish the night and all that might be happening in it, Oliver played the piano loudly. When he finally stumbled to his bed, he saw a single yellow rose on the pillow, delicate and sweet. He placed it by the lamp on the nightstand and pulled the covers over himself, clothes and all.
In the early hours of morning, he dreamed that Miss Parkhurst had fled the mansion, leaving it for him to tend to. The ghosts and old men crowded around, asking how he could be so righteous. “She never had a Momma like you,” said one decrepit dude dressed in black velvet robes. “She’s lived times you can’t imagine. Now you just blew her right out of this house. Where will she go?”
Oliver came awake long enough to remember the dream, and then returned to a light, difficult sleep.
Mrs. Diamond Freeland scowled at Yolanda’s hand-wringing and mumbling. “You can’t help your momma acting that way,” she said.
“I’m no doctor,” Yolanda complained.
“No doctor’s going to help her,” Mrs. Freeland said, eyeing the door to Momma’s bedroom.
Denver and Reggie lounged in the parlor.
“You two louts going to look for your brother?”
“We don’t have to look for him,” Denver said. “We know where he is. We got a plan to get him back.”
“Then why don’t you do it?” Mrs. Freeland asked.
“When the time’s right,” Reggie said.
“Your Momma’s pining for Oliver,” Mrs. Freeland told them, not for the first time. “It’s churning her insides thinking he’s with that witch and what she might be doing to him.”
Reggie tried unsuccessfully to hide a grin.
“What’s funny?” Mrs. Freeland asked.
“Nothing. Maybe our little brother needs some of what she’s got.”
Mrs. Freeland glared at them, then rolled her eyes in disgust. “Yolanda,” she said, “the babies. They dry?”
“No, ma’am,” Yolanda said. She backed away from Mrs. Freeland’s severe look. “I’ll change them.”
“Then you take them in to your momma.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
The breakfast proceeded as if nothing had happened. Miss Parkhurst sat across from him, eating and smiling. Oliver tried to be more polite, working his way around to asking a favor. When the breakfast was over, the time seemed right.
“I’d like to see how Momma’s doing,” he said.
Miss Parkhurst considered for a moment. “There’ll be a TV in your room this evening,” she said, folding her napkin and placing it beside her plate. “You can use it to see how everybody is.”
That seemed fair enough. Until then, however, he’d be spending the entire day with Miss Parkhurst; it was time, he decided, to be civil. Then he might actually test his freedom.
“You say I can go,” Oliver said, trying to sound friendly.
Miss Parkhurst nodded. “Anytime. I won’t keep you.”
“If I go, can I come back?”
She smiled ever so slightly. There was the young girl in that smile again, and she seemed very vulnerable. “The opener takes you anywhere across town.”
“Nobody messes with me?”
“Nobody touches anyone I protect,” Miss Parkhurst said.
Oliver absorbed that, steepling his hands below his chin. “You’re pretty good to me,” he said. “Even when I cross you, you don’t hurt me. Why?”
“I’ve lived a long time and nobody like you’s come along,” Miss Parkhurst said, dark eyes on him. “I’ve lived this way so many years, I don’t know another, but I don’t want any more. You’re my last chance.”
Oliver couldn’t think of a better way to put his next question. “Do you like being a whore?”
Miss Parkhurst’s face hardened. “It has its moments,” she said.
Oliver screwed up his courage enough to say what was on his mind, but not to look at her while doing it. “You enjoy lying down with any man who has the money?”
“It’s something I’m good at.”
“Even ugly men?”
“Ugly men need their pleasures.”
“Bad men? Letting them touch you when they’ve hurt people, killed people?”
“What kind of work have you done?” she asked.
“Clerked a grocery store. Taught music.”
“Did you wait on bad men in the grocery store?”
“If I did,” Oliver said swiftly, “I didn’t know about it.”
“Neither did I,” Miss Parkhurst said. Then, more quietly, “Most of the time.”
“All those girls you’ve made whore for you …”
“You have some things to learn,” she interrupted. “It’s not the work that’s so awful. It’s what you have to be to do it. The way people expect you to be when you do it. Should be, in
a good world, a whore’s like a doctor or a saint, she doesn’t mind getting her hands dirty any more than they do. She gives pleasure and smiles. But in the city, people won’t let it happen that way. Here, a whore’s always got some empty place inside her, a place you’ve filled with self-respect, maybe. A whore’s got respect, but not for herself. She loses that whenever anybody looks at her. She can be worth a million dollars on the outside, but inside, she knows. That’s what makes her a whore. That’s the curse. It’s beat into you sometimes, everybody taking advantage, like you’re dirt. Pretty soon you think you’re dirt, too, and who cares what happens to dirt? Pretty soon you’re just sliding along, trying to keep from getting hurt or maybe dead, but who cares?”
“You’re rich,” Oliver said.
“Can’t buy everything,” Miss Parkhurst commented dryly.
“You’ve got magic.”
“I’ve got magic because I’m here, and to stay here, I have to be a whore.”
“Why can’t you leave?”
She sighed, her fingers working nervously along the edge of the tablecloth.
“What stops you from just leaving?”
“If you’re going to own this place,” she said, and he thought at first she was avoiding his question, “you’ve got to know all about it. All about me. We’re the same, almost, this place and I. A whore’s no more than what’s in her purse, every pimp knows that. You know how many times I’ve been married?”
Oliver shook his head.
“Seventeen times. Sometimes they left me, once or twice they stayed. Never any good. But then, maybe I didn’t deserve better. Those who left me, they came back when they were old, asked me to save them from Darkside. I couldn’t. But I kept them here anyway. Come on.”
She stood and Oliver followed her down the halls, down the stairs, below the garage level, deep beneath the mansion’s clutter-filled basement. The air was ageless, deep-earth cool, and smelled of old city rain. A few eternal clear light bulbs cast feeble yellow crescents in the dismal murk. They walked on boards over an old muddy patch, Miss Parkhurst lifting her skirts to clear the mire. Oliver saw her slim ankles and swallowed back the tightness in his throat.
Ahead, laid out in a row on moss-patched concrete biers, were fifteen black iron cylinders, each eight feet long and slightly flattened on top. They looked like big blockbuster bombs in storage. The first was wedged into a dark corner. Miss Parkhurst stood by its foot, running her hand along its rust-streaked surface.
“Two didn’t come back. Maybe they were the best of the lot,” she said. “I couldn’t know. You judge men by what’s inside you, and if you’re hollow, they get lost, you can’t know what’s in their hearts.”
Oliver stepped closer to the last cylinder and saw a clear glass plate mounted at the head. Reluctant but fascinated, he wiped the dusty glass with two fingers and peered past a single cornered bubble. The coffin was filled with clear liquid. Afloat within, a face the color of green olives in a martini looked back at him, blind eyes murky, lips set in a loose line. The liquid and death had smoothed the face’s wrinkles, but Oliver could tell nonetheless, this dude had been old, really old.
“They all die,” she said. “All but me. I keep them all, every john, every husband, no forgetting, no letting them go. We’ve got this tie between us, forever. That’s part of the curse.”
Oliver pulled back from the coffin, holding his breath, heart thumping with eager horror. Which was worse, this, or old men in the night? Old dead loves laid to rest or lively ghosts? Wrapped in gloom at the far end of the line of bottle-coffins, Miss Parkhurst seemed for a moment to glow with the same furnace power he had felt when he first saw her.
“I miss some of these guys,” she said, her voice so soft the power just vanished, a thing in his mind. “We had some good times.”
Oliver tried to imagine what Miss Parkhurst had lived through, the good times and otherwise. “You have any children?” he asked, his voice as thin as the buzz of a fly in a bottle. He jumped back as one of the coffins resonated with his shaky words.
Miss Parkhurst’s shoulders shivered as well. “Lots,” she said tightly. “All dead before they were born.”
At first his shock was conventional, orchestrated by his Sundays in church. Then the colossal organic waste of effort came down on him like a pile of stones. All that motion, all that wanting, and nothing good from it—just these iron bottles and vivid lines of ghosts.
“What good is a whore’s baby?” Miss Parkhurst asked. “Especially if the mother’s going to stay a whore.”
“Was your mother … ?” It didn’t seem right to use the word in connection with anyone’s mother.
“She was, and her mother before her. I have no daddies, or lots of daddies.”
Oliver remembered the old man chastising him in his dream. Before he could even sort out his words, wishing to give her some solace, some sign he wasn’t completely unsympathetic, he said, “It can’t be all bad, being a whore.”
“Maybe not,” she said. Miss Parkhurst hardly made a blot in the larger shadows. She might just fly to dust if he turned his head.
“You said being a whore is being empty inside. Not everybody who’s empty inside is a whore.”
“Oh?” she replied, voice light as a cobweb. He was being pushed into an uncharacteristic posture, but Oliver was damned if he’d give in just yet, however much a fool he made of himself. His mixed feelings were betraying him.
“You’ve lived,” he said. “You got memories nobody else has. You could write books. They’d make movies about you.”
Her smile was a dull lamp in the shadows. “I’ve had important people visit me,” she said. “Powerful men, mayors, even governors. I had something they needed. Sometimes they opened up and talked about how hard it was not being little boys. Sometimes, after we’d relaxed, they’d cry on my shoulder, just like I was their momma. But then they’d go away and try to forget about me. If they remembered at all, they were scared of me, because of what I knew about them. Now, they know I’m getting weak,” she said. “I don’t give a damn about books or movies. I won’t tell what I know, and besides, lots of those men are dead. If they aren’t, they’re waiting for me to die, so they can sleep easy.”
“What do you mean, getting weak?”
“I got two days, maybe three, until I come to the end of my cord and die a whore. My time is up. The curse is almost done.”
Oliver gaped. When he had first seen her, she had seemed as powerful as a diesel locomotive, as if she might live forever.
“And if I take over?”
“You get the mansion, the money.”
“How much power?”
She didn’t answer.
“You can’t give me any power, can you?”
“No,” faint as the breeze from her eyelashes.
“The opener won’t be any good.”
“No.”
“You lied to me.”
“I’ll leave you all that’s left.”
“That’s not why you made me come here. You took Momma—”
“She stole from me.”
“My momma never stole anything!” Oliver shouted. The iron coffins buzzed.
“She took something after I showed her my hospitality.”
“What could she take from you? She was no thief.”
“She took a sheet of music.”
Oliver’s face screwed up in sudden pain. He looked away, fists clenched. They had almost no money for his music. More often than not since his father died, he made up music, having no new scores to play. “Why’d you bring me here?” he cried.
“I don’t mind dying. But I don’t want to die a whore.”
Oliver turned back, angry again, this time for his momma as well as himself. He approached the insubstantial shadow. Miss Parkhurst shimmered like a curtain. “What do you want from me?”
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“I need someone who loves me. Loves me for no reason.”
For an instant, he saw standing before him a scrawny girl in a red shimmy, eyes wide.
“How could that help you? Can that make you something else?”
“Just love,” she said. “Just letting me forget all these.” She pointed to the coffins. “And all those.” Pointing up.
Oliver’s body lost its charge of anger and accusation with an exhaled breath. “I can’t love you,” he said. “I don’t even know what love is.” Was this true? Upstairs, she had burned in his mind, and he had wanted her, though it upset him to remember how much. What could he feel for her? “Let’s go back now. I have to look in on Momma.”
Miss Parkhurst separated herself from the shadows and glided silently past him, not even her skirts rustling. She gestured with a finger for him to follow, and left him at the door to his room, saying, “I’ll wait in the main parlor.”
Oliver saw a small television set on the nightstand by his bed and rushed to turn it on. The screen filled with static and unresolved images. He saw fragments of faces, patches of color and texture passing so quickly he couldn’t make them out. The entire city might be on the screen at once, but he could not see any of it clearly. He twisted the channel knob and got more static. Then he turned the knob beyond 13: HOME, it said, in small golden letters.
The screen cleared.
Momma lay in bed, legs drawn up tight, hair mussed. She didn’t look good. Her outstretched hand trembled. Her breathing was hard and rough. In the background, Oliver heard Yolanda fussing with the babies, finally screaming at her older brothers in frustration. Why don’t you help with the babies? his sister demanded in a tinny, distant voice.
Momma told you, Denver replied.
She did not. She told us all. You could help.
Reggie laughed. We got to make plans!
Oliver pulled back from the TV. Momma was sick, and for all his brothers and sister and the babies could do, she might die. He could guess why she was sick, too; with worry for him. He had to go to her and tell her he was all right. A phone call wouldn’t be enough.