Changer’s Moon dos-3

by Jo Clayton

  She started down the hall, moving a little easier with each step; going somewhere seemed to loosen her up and ease the pain, so that could manage the stairs.

  The door to the apartment nearest the stairs was open partway. She started past it, stopped when she heard a low sound filled with pain. She wanted to go on, to ignore that moan, but she knew only too well what that open door meant. I won’t give in, she thought; I won’t let them make me a stone. She reached into her purse, got her dark glasses, put them on to cover the swelling around her eyes, and went into the room.

  He was on his knees beside the sprawled body of his lover, the boy who’d come to help her some months before, who’d grinned at her after that if they chanced to meet on the stairs, who’d helped her tote her packages up the stairs. His friend’s head was turned so his profile was crisp against the dark blue of the rug, his head tilted, at an impossible angle against his shoulder. He looked as if some giant had picked him up, snapped his neck and thrown him carelessly aside. The youth, whose name she still didn’t know, was crying very quietly, rocking forward and back, his arms closed tight over his chest, his mouth swollen, bleeding, his nose swollen, perhaps broken.

  “Hello,” she said. It seemed absurd, but what else could she say?

  The boy jerked around, somehow propelled himself away from her and onto his feet, reminding her of a wild cat she’d seen late one night when she was supposed to be in bed but couldn’t sleep because the moon was so bright it made her want things she couldn’t name. She’d come on the cat while it was tearing at a rabbit’s carcass. It had leaped up like the boy, put distance between them, then waited to see what she would do, unwilling to abandon the rabbit unless it had to.

  The boy’s face changed when he recognized her and saw her injuries. “They got you too?” His voice was mushy, lisping, his arms up tight against his ribs again, an automatic movement dictated by pain.

  “Little over an hour ago.” She walked slowly to the man’s body, stood looking down at it, then lifted her head and looked at the boy. “What are you going to do?”

  He turned his head, with a farouche look, but he said nothing.

  She glanced at her watch. The cab wouldn’t wait, she had to get downstairs. She dug into her purse, brought out her spare keys, held them out, said, “Look, I don’t know you, nor you me, and I’ve got no right to tell you what to do and maybe you already know what to do, but I suggest you get the hell out of here. Leave your friend. You can’t do anything for him now. Those shitbags who did this, they’ll call the police on you. This isn’t a time when you could get anything like a fair trial. You probably wouldn’t even survive long enough to have a trial.” She jangled her keys. “Take these. If you want, you can go to ground a little while in my apartment. Think things out. Be out of the way if the police do come. I’ll be back… um… in a couple of hours probably, going to see my doctor.” She smiled, winced as the cut in her lip pulled. “Look, I’ve got to go. Make up your mind.”

  He gazed at her a moment longer. “You sure you want to do this? Could make trouble for you. More trouble.”

  “Hnh! More trouble than I got already? You notice they had keys? The police come down on me, you won’t make more hassle for me. I’ve got a feeling…” She touched her ribs then her cut lip. “I wouldn’t last longer than you.” He gaped at her. “Purveyor of filth,” she said. “I’m a writer.” She looked at her watch. “Last time-you want the keys or not. I’m going.”

  His face went drawn and bleak, gaining ten years in that moment, and he came to her, taking the keys. “Thanks. Mind if I pack some things and shift them over?”

  She started for the door. “Whatever you want. Better keep it light, but you know better than I do how much you can shift and keep easy on your feet. And remember the guard downstairs; you’ll have to get past him.”

  She heard a soft clearing of his throat, smiled a little and went out to tackle the stairs.

  The sun was brilliant, the sky cloudless. She blinked as she stepped outside. She’d known it was still early, she’d looked at her watch again and again, yet the brightness and calm of the afternoon startled her. The street was empty. Perhaps the blackshirts hadn’t called the police about the dead man, perhaps they were expecting the boy to do himself in by trying to rid himself of the body, perhaps they were just making sure of alibis before they acted.

  The cab was a few minutes late, giving her time to catch her breath. The boxy blue vehicle stopped in the middle of the street. The driver thumbed a button and the passenger door hummed open, then he sat drumming his fingers on the steering wheel as she walked slowly across and with some difficulty climbed into the back.

  “Where to?” The driver’s voice, tinny and harsh, crackled through the cheap speaker.

  She opened her mouth, shut it again. As bad as phoning. She ran her tongue over her lips, tasted the slight saltiness of blood. The cut had opened when she was talking to the boy. She tried to think. “Evenger building,” she said finally.

  “Right.”

  As the cab ground off, she pressed her hand hard against her mouth as some of the strain left her. She was on her way to help at last. Evenger building was across the square from the Medical Center where Dr. James Alexander Norris had his office. Her friend, her doctor. He’d spent time and patience on her, filling in and signing the interminable forms that the office snowed on her and had looked into private charities for her. This was the end of all that struggle. She probably shouldn’t be going to see him now, but she had no real choice. She pushed the dark glasses back up her nose. I’d better phone from the Evenger, she thought. Let him know what to expect. She sighed. Let him decide if he wants to see me.

  She lowered herself into the chair as the nurse went briskly out. Her head was swimming; she felt nauseated and worn to a thread.

  A hand touched her shoulder. “Julia?”

  She lifted her head. For a moment she couldn’t speak, then she grunted with pain as the cracked rib shifted and bruised muscles protested. She reached up, pulled off the dark glasses.

  He came round in front of her, a slight dark man, grave now, his usual quick nervous smile suppressed, his dark eyes troubled. He leaned closer, his fingers gentle on the swellings under her eyes. “Blackshirts did this?”

  “That and a lot more. Five of them. They came for my books and manuscripts. I made the mistake of slapping one of them.” She spoke wearily, dropped her head against the back of the chair, closed her eyes. “They raped me. Anything that’s started I want stopped. Off the pill. You know. No lover. Me over forty. You warned me. God, I couldn’t stand… couldn’t stand it. Pregnant by one of those… those neanderthals.” She sighed, opened her eyes. “Jim, I’m poison. Guilt by association. That the way their minds work, those lumps of gristle they call minds. I’m afraid I’ve already made trouble for you. Your name on all those papers…”

  “Let’s get you on the table.” He took her hand and helped her to stand. “Technically the nurse should be here but I thought you’d rather not. How long ago did all this happen?”

  “You’re right as usual.” She grunted as she eased onto the slick white paper. “I got home a little before two. By the way, I didn’t tell you. One of them kicked me in the head and I was out until just about three. No double vision but one hell of a throb.”

  His hands moved quickly over her, producing assorted grunts, gasps and groans that he listened to with a combination of detached interest and anxiety. “And how are you feeling right now?”

  “Sore. She tried to laugh but couldn’t. “Angry. Frightened. But you don’t want to hear that. Nauseated. But not to the point of having to vomit. Kind of sick all over. There was some dizziness but that hasn’t come back for a while now, aaah-unh! One of the boots must’ve got me there. Most of all tired. So tired, it takes all I have to move, you know, like trying to run against water.”

  “Mmm. X-ray first, then some more tests. I’ve got things set up so they’ll take you now, no questions.�
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  “I… I can’t pay for them.”

  “Don’t worry about that, Julia. Forget about everything and let me take care of you.”

  When tests and treatment were done, he walked with her down to the basement carpark, meaning to take her home before he went out to the safer suburbs and the family he kept resolutely separate from his practice. They walked down the gritty oily metal ramp, their footsteps booming and scraping, the sounds broken into incoherence, echoing and re-echoing until there seemed an army marching heavy-footed down into the cavernous basement. He dipped his head close to hers. “I can’t live with what’s happening here, Julia,” he said. “Police and others have been at me for weeks to open my records. I won’t do that, burn them first. I’ve been making arrangements to go north. There’s a medical group in Caledron willing to take me in.” He hesitated. She felt his uncertainty, felt the resolution grow in him. “You can’t stay here. Come up with us.”

  She glanced at him, surprised yet not surprised after all. She appreciated the invitation all the more because of the reluctance with which it was given. It wasn’t easy for him, he’d be a lot happier if she refused, but the offer was genuine. In a lot of ways he was a very nice man. A nice man with a sweet bitch for a wife who owned his baffled loyalty. He’d stopped loving her years ago but to this day wouldn’t admit to himself that he didn’t even like her. Julia didn’t know the woman but some years back when she’d met Jim over the tangled lives of several of his charity patients, she’d heard more than she wanted about her. He was going through a phase where he was unable to stop talking about her whenever he could find a receptive ear. Her name was Elaine. She was a slim dark woman with a natural elegance and much charm when she chose to exercise it. He never spoke of intimate things, that was a matter of taste for him, bad taste to take such things outside the home, but she gathered there was a wall between him and his wife he couldn’t penetrate. Because he was wholly uninterested in anything beyond the diseases and disabilities in the bodies he examined, yet had a sensitivity to nuance he couldn’t quite suppress, Elaine had him in a ferment of misery and guilt which she seemed to take a certain satisfaction in creating. Julia had sufficient good sense not to tell him what his wife was doing to him, sufficient perception to see that being shut off from nine-tenths of his life had driven her to this, and not enough sense to avoid comforting him as much as she could. While they worked out the tangles of the cases, they worked themselves into a brief affair. He clung to Julia with an urgency that troubled her; she wasn’t in love with him, or so she thought, but she liked him very well indeed. And she was grateful for the need that brought him to her. The casework was getting to her more and more, eroding the hope and humanity out of her, sucking her dry of all feeling but a generalized impatience with the self-defeated souls she was trying to help. Even the ones with the capacity to break out of the morass had so many defeats ahead of them, so many leeches battening on them, that after a while they ran out of energy, they simply had no strength left to climb over the next barrier that folly, greed and prejudice raised before them. In those last days before she quit, it was a kind of race to see if she could manage to leave before she was fired. She began working as her clients’ advocate rather than as an impersonal conduit for services; she bent the rules more and more savagely as they (the anonymous gray they in offices she never visited, never wanted to visit) threw the worst cases at her, then reprimands for sidestepping regulations. She tended the chinks in the system and did her best to help her people through them; she brought her work home with her. She couldn’t write. She began to feel brittle, dry, as if the least blow would shatter her to powder. She lost her laughter and the thing she’d never thought to lose, her rush of delight in the sudden beauty of small things. Somehow, by loving her and needing her, Jim breathed life back into her. Only a handful of meetings, yet they triggered in her a healing flow that she couldn’t tell him about because he would never understand the only words she could find to express what had happened to her. She did manage, by tact and indirection, to give him ways of dealing with his wife and earned his profound gratitude by easing the sex out of their relationship as soon as she realized how unhappy and uneasy he was about what they were doing; he had no idea how to stop without hurting her and he was unwilling to hurt her. Though the change was rather more painful for her than she’d expected, nonetheless she was happy enough with the affectionate committed friendship they’d shared afterward. She owed him something else too, a debt she hoped he’d never discover. He and his troubles with his wife had formed the basis of the one novel she’d come close to getting on the best seller list, the novel that had won a fairly prestigious award, that had brought her enough money to quit the job, enough recognition to make her next two novels sell almost as well and to get the first into paperback.

  She reached over, touched his face with reminiscent tenderness, shook her head. “They wouldn’t let me out, Jim. They need their objects of scorn. Though I thank you for the offer.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “I don’t know. Go somewhere. Fight them somehow. As long as I can.”

  He ran a hand through fine, thinning hair. “Suicide, Julia. And it’s unnecessary.”

  “By whose terms?” She shrugged, the tape around her ribs tugging at her. “These days there’s only one solution to the problems of poverty. Can’t make it? Too bad. Go curl up and die, preferably at the city dump so no time or money has to be wasted carting you away. I’d rather make them shoot me. At least that’s over fast. And no, I won’t kill myself. I don’t think I could, anyway that’s giving in to them. I’ll never give in to them.”

  “You oughtn’t to be alone, Julia.” He looked at her, worried. “I don’t like the way you’re talking. “It’s not…”

  “Not healthy? I know. The times are out of joint, my friend, and there’s nothing I can do to set them right. Did I tell you? No, I’m sure not. Publisher rejected my last book, wants his advance back. No, don’t worry about me, I won’t be alone. A boy from down the hall is there waiting for me. My little band of brothers visited him after they left me. Broke his friend’s neck. An excess of zeal, no doubt. Kicked him about too, but seems a corpse made them nervous so they were a trifle half-hearted in the beating. He can still move.” She got into the car as he held the door open for her, sat with her head against the rest, her eyes closed. When she felt the seat shift, heard the other door close, she said, “Don’t mind me, Jim. Gloom and doom’s all I have in me right now. I’ll be back to my usual bounce and glow given a night’s rest. I’m just tired. That’s all. Just tired.”

  Suicide. She brooded on that during the struggle up the stairs. The lumps had started showing up on x-ray plates though she still couldn’t feel them. Bigger but operable. She did have a bit of hope again. If she could get across the border and up to Caledron, if she could manage to get some sort of papers, Jim had promised to ease her into a hospital there. Money. It was going to take a lot of money. If I have to rob a bank, she thought and grinned into the turgid light about the stairs. She leaned for a moment on the rail and rested, then started up again. It might take something like that. Been honest all my life, she thought. Proud of it. She sighed. I’m going to make a lousy criminal. Have to use my connections. She giggled, caught her breath as she clung to the rail. A drop of water plonked on her head, another hit her shoulder. Oh hell. She started on again. Scattered among the beaten-down, the frantic, the wistfully hopeful, the ignorant, greedy, despairing, lazy, energetic, damaged and ambitious mixture that made up her files were a few whose sons, husbands, boyfriends or girlfriends she’d met on home visits when they’d learned to trust her enough to show up-burglars, pimps, whores, conmen and women, a bankrobber or two and a charming forger who took an artist’s pride in his work. He’d be useful if he was still out of prison-or out again, as the case might be. And there was old Magic Man. He knew everything about everybody. If he hadn’t been rounded-up and shoved into a labor camp. Probably ha
dn’t, he looked too decrepit to do anything but breathe. He loved ripe apricots; she always took him some, even when she couldn’t afford it, she enjoyed so much watching him enjoy them. Sometimes he helped her with her books; more often than not she just went to hear his stories. He had a thousand stories of places he’d been, things he’d done and he never told them the same twice. He’d worked for her father a couple summers, helping with the haying, milking the cows, disappeared as quietly as he’d come until he’d showed up one day on her client list. He hadn’t forgotten her, recognized the girl in the woman without any prompting, talked to her a lot about her father after that, something she’d been needing for a long time. Thinking about him she forgot about her body and went round and round the stairs until she almost blundered past her floor. She stopped, put out her hand to the wall to steady herself, a little dizzy with her exertions and her sudden return to the unpleasant here and now. She pushed the bar in, grunting as the effort caught her in muscles that were getting stiffer and more painful as the hours passed. The door thumped to behind her as she started down the hall, the sound making her jump, reminding her just how nervous she really was. The hall was empty. The worn drugget was full of holes and so filthy she couldn’t see what color it was, couldn’t remember either. I stopped noticing things, she thought. When I stopped being a writer. She looked at her watch. Almost eight. Weariness descended on her. She stood, resting against the wall a moment, then made off toward her apartment.

  The one lock was engaged as she’d left it, but when she pushed on the door, it caught. For an instant she didn’t realize what was wrong, just stood there staring at the door that wouldn’t open, then she saw that the chain was on. And remembered-the boy from down the hall.