by Anthology
SEVEN
I got off at 8:00 and Hal was waiting for me, in the lot of the KwikPik. At 8:04 the professor rolled in in his Geo Metro. At 8:05 guess who rolled in in her Volvo.
"No way!" said Hal from the back of the Cavalier. He sent me out to deal with her. He was taping a foam cradle for the camcorder to the shelf behind the back seat.
The professor began the process of getting out of the Geo Metro. Ruth Ann was already out of her Volvo. She was wearing her denim jacket again. Plus toreador pants and eyeliner. I felt like arresting her.
"You're not going!" I said.
"Camilla, don't even try to stop me," she said. "Besides, you're supposed to be my cousin. Blood's thicker than water."
"Everything's thicker than water," I said.
"We'll see!" She stomped off and helped the professor out of his car, bending over, probably to let him know what she was wearing under her jacket. Or wasn't.
"Why shouldn't she go?" the professor said. "She's the one who actually knows somebody there."
"We all know somebody there," I said. "That's because there's only one person there."
"Well, she's going," said the professor. "And she's riding up front with me."
"Three in the front? And since when do you decide things around here?" I looked at Hal, waiting for him to speak up. Instead, he was looking at his shoes. The professor held out his hand and Hal put the keys to the Cavalier in it. I was suddenly beginning to get the picture.
"Hal," I said, "you are an absolute moron." I walked into the store to get a V-8. I always drink a V-8 when I am disgusted. It's the only thing that helps.
When I came back out, the Cavalier was gone. So were Ruth Ann and the professor. Hal was sitting in the Metro.
"They decided it would be better without either one of us," he said. "How do you like my new car?"
It's not like we didn't know where they were going. We headed out Old 19 toward Dead Man's Curve. We were going up the bluff on the inside when they were coming down, so we saw the whole thing. The white posts broke off like bad teeth and the Cavalier sailed right through. It seemed to hang for a minute in the air, and I thought--hoped--that the world was going to turn inside out like a sock and catch it. But it didn't.
The Cavalier started sliding down the bluff, through the little saplings and brush, then bounced off the rocks with a crunch, then dropped out of sight. We didn't hear it hit for a long time.
Then we heard it hit.
"Sweet fucking Jesus," said Hal. He pulled over and we got out of the car. I could lean over the bluff, holding onto the broken cable that had run through the white posts, and see the Cavalier wedged between a rock and a sycamore, the front end just over the water.
Hal was standing with one hand on the door of the Metro like he was paralyzed.
"Go get help!" I said. I started down the cliff. The broken cable helped me far enough so that I could slide the rest of the way. The doors to the Cavalier were wedged shut and the professor was dead. So was Ruth Ann. I buttoned her denim jacket through the window. I took the camcorder from the shelf behind the back seat, and hid it in the bushes for later. I waited up on the road for the police to come. Even though it was summer it was cold.
The police came by to interview me at work the next day. KwikPik only gives days off for immediate family. I told them I didn't know anything. They said they would be back. I went by to see Ervin that night and told him, "They were doing some kind of experiment. The professor was convinced that the wave patterns helped him see into the future or something. You know how Ruth Ann loved that stuff."
"She did?" It must have been Ervin who called off the cops. The only real inquest was held by Hal and me after Ruth Ann was buried. We waited two nights so as not to seem callous. (Or get spotted.) We retrieved the camcorder and took it to his apartment.
The video was shot from the shelf behind the back seat. It showed them starting around the curve. The professor had the speed exactly right at forty-two. It showed Ruth Ann unbuttoning her jacket. The professor was looking down at her. The car veered and she grabbed the wheel, either to save them or to run them off the cliff, there was no way of knowing.
Hal and I watched it again and again. It was our black box. Our flight recorder. I could see Ruth Ann's breasts in the rear view mirror, but not her face.
She disappeared just as the car was going over. The professor never did.
"Does that mean he never got to see the pocket universe?" I asked.
"Beats me," said Hal. "I don't see how we'll ever find out. Even if I could find the exact car with the exact sound and everything, the white posts are gone."
Ervin was remarried within four months. Hal moved to Louisville as soon as he got his two year degree. I'm still at the KwikPik working two shifts on Sundays. My boyfriend never showed up again. I didn't actually expect him to. But enough about him. And Ruth Ann? Even though we were never exactly close, I hope she's safe in her pocket universe with Wascomb. Living happily ever after. Or whatever they do there.
UNDERSTANDING ENTROPY
Barry N. Malzberg
SO I GO TO MARTIN DONNER'S bedside in the room they have staked out for him in Florida, and I ask him the crucial question: If you had known? I say, if you had known that it would end this way, that you would be dying of a hundred wounds, of the tuberculosis, of the pneumocystitis, of the parasites and the kidney breakdown and the hepatitis, the jaundice, the venetium and the shattering of the pancreas, if you had known that five years after the positive diagnosis and three years after the first episode of the pneumonia you would be lying here, 82 pounds, filled with morphine which does not work anymore -- oh, nothing works but that isn't quite the point is it, they are trying -- with your lover and your daughters and your wife and the doctors circling in the outer room and coming in now and then to inspect your reeking corpus, some of them weeping, others taking your pulse and monitoring your breathing: if you had known this 15 years ago, Martin Donner, if you had known everything that would happen to you and that it would end this way, would you have left your wife and children to their lives and your history and gone out to Fire Island, Cherry Groves, the baths and the bathhouses and the quick and the scuffled, the long and the grievous affairs full time, no longer sneaking it around? Would you if you had known? Or would you have stayed in your marriage in the suburbs, Martin Donner, and played with your daughters and watched them grow and claimed your wife with closed eyes in the marriage bed and nothing more, nothing more because you would never know when the dogs truly came into the basement and snuffled up the stairs? Oh maybe once a year you might let some man tend to you with rubber gloves in a bank vault, but otherwise nothing, nothing, nothing at all? If you could have seen that it would have ended this way, Martin, what would you have done? Tell me the truth now. Do you know the truth? Is there any such thing as the truth? Because I need, I need, I need to know now, it affects my own situation.
He stares at me. He is relatively lucid now, it comes and it goes, in and out back and forth, the pounding on the chest has loosened the phlegm, the morphine has momentarily quelled the cough, he thinks that he can think, although this is not necessarily the issue, and he thinks, of course, that I am a hallucination. Hallucination is common in this late-life condition, although the dementia has not affected him as fully as it might in a few more hours or (if he lasts that long, he probably will not) days. I don't know, he says. His eyes are strangely lustrous, the only motion, the only thing in his face not quiescent, the rest is dead, bland, sunken, a canvas upon which has been embedded the full and perfect features of the dead, the valley of the dead, the shades and valleys and small tablelands upon which the dead walk until at last they sleep. Yes, Martin Donner says, yes I do know. I can answer that. He thrashes weakly, the ganglia in his shattered nerves trying to pull into alignment. I wouldn't have done it he said. I would not have died this way. It is not worth it. I thought it was worth it, that it was worth any price to be what you are, to live expressly and fu
lly but it is not. This is unbearable, I am sinking, I am sinking in disgrace, I wet myself, I humiliate myself, I see the with visions and dream of such inextinguishable horror... no, he says, no, and his voice is momentarily stronger, he screams in the room, no, he says, I would not have left them, I would have stayed there and I would have died, I would have died in a thousand ways but it is the difference between metaphor and truth, they are not the same, once I thought they were but no, no, no, no, no, no, he says uncontrollably, the word ratched uncontrollably, and he sinks into the steaming sheets, his eyes fluttering, closed and the coughing, the moaning, the turgid phlegm passes again through his desiccated and shattered cavities. No, he says, and no, I drink, his answer is no and momentarily there is a kind of settling; I can feel my own realignment and a sense of history colliding with imminence merging with the steaming and impenetrable future, but of course this fusion cannot last and I am in Martin Donner's bedroom 15 years earlier, the bedroom on the second floor of the suburban colonial in one of the nicest areas of a nicer suburb in the sets of anterooms to the city, and I have put the question again. I have put it to him calmly and without sinister intent and then have used my powers -- the powers granted me by the old and terrible antagonist who nonetheless, and this is undeniable, always plays fair, as fairly as Martin did not with his wife and daughters and friends and family through all of the years up to this point. I show him the bottles, the tubing, the arc and density of the room, the harsh and desperate light and it is uncommonly vivid, I have placed all my powers in the service of this adtunbration. Oh yes, Martin says, seeing it all, oh yes, I see now. Yes, he says, it is worth it. I would do this. I would not be deterred. It is worth it. It is worth anything to expressly enact what you are, what you must be, the full and alarming necessities of the soul. So I do not care, he says. I am going, I am going to leave, if this is my destiny. So be it. His features congeal with conviction, unlike his face in the room of his death, they recede and pulsate, project and flutter with light there is light all through him. Worth it he says, worth it to be what one is. How many years until this happens? he says. Not that it matters. But I want to know.
Seventeen, I say. Seventeen years and not all of them will be happy. Your daughters will weep and one of them will hate you, there will be many betrayals, also other illnesses, earlier illnesses, small and larger betrayals, a terrible bout with hepatitis. Disgraceful venereal conditions. I don't care, he says, 17 years is a good time. In 17 years here, lying here, sneaking around, pounding myself into myself, I will be dead, I will have lolled myself anyway. No, he says, there is no question there is no argument. I have made my choice. He closes his eyes, smiles, thinking evidently that he is dreaming. Such dialogues are common inside Martin in this crucial time; he thinks that he is constructing a worst case venue but is nonetheless being firm. Yes, he says, I will do this. His breathing, irregular, levels out. As I withdraw, he thinks that he is making passage into dreamless slumber. As he wedes he feels, I know, some kind of imminence, and perhaps it is my question, no less than anything else, which has led him to this resolution. Or perhaps not. It is difficult to work within such difficult and speculative borders without being overwhelmed by my own relative helplessness and stupor.
BUT OF COURSE THIS IS IN ONLY PARTIAL quest of verification. I move through the channels of recorded (and possible) time, asking Martin Donner this question at various places within the continuum. I discuss this with him at Cherry Grove in 1978 at a tea dance while he is hanging shyly against the walls, yes he says, of course it is worth it. I ask him this in 1986 when, thunderously, the implications of the positive diagnosis beg to come through to him and he closes his eyes as I make the forced pictures in his head showing him what it would be like: I don't know, he says, I don't know, I am in shock, I am in agony here, I can't give you a false or a real answer, can take no position, how can I tell? Maybe I shouldn't have done it, I don't know, I don't know. Take the question to him in Chicago two years later, he is attending a class reunion with his lover, partial remission, he feels in control of himself, some benignity, perhaps illusory but the moment can be extended, he feels, as so many other moments have been extended I would have done it again, he says, knowing what I know, I would have wanted it this way still, I would not have treated it differently, I would not exchange these years for anything. Ask him and ask him, up and down the line, sometimes an enthusiastic, desperate yes, other times more tentative, a no at the end and tracking back from that no mostly for the six to eight months before this special, spectacular extended agony; his position then is not fixed any more than it might have been 20, 30 years ago when Martin refused to respond to the messages flicking like trap shots from the basement of his sensibilty. Nothing is sure, nothing is firm. Mostly yes, an occasional no, more no as the end is approached, but even then at some of the moments in between the moments of the worst anguish, a soft insistent yes. It is not fixed, nothing is fixed, the human condition is not fixed. The price we will pay for fully expressing what we are does seem indeterminate then. It resonates, this confusion, against my own uncertainty, and I understand then, staring at and through all of this, that there can be no answers from Martin, none at all. If Martin is the voice and tensor of all possibility, then there is no possibility, no singularity.
Understanding it does not surprise me but fills me with a desperate and irreparable weakness; I would not have had it this way, I would have wanted surer answers. Everyone wants answers if not the answer, even I. I return to my old antagonist on the desert and hand him the helmet and the simulating device and the other armaments of our translation, our bargain, our possibility. I have wrestled and wrestled, I say, I have wrestled you through all the avenues of this life and I do not know, I am stunned and pinned, dislocated and shattered. Martin is not the answer, he can provide me with no firm basis at all.
Of course, my old antagonist says. His ruddy skin glows with sympathy or perhaps it is only health. Or vindication. You see, he says, you are left with it just as I said, you are left with all of this on your own. You must decide what price to pay and whether that is correct and no one can know. He backs away from me, horns a rapier, fine eyes glints of purpose in the night. Now, he says, now you must decide. You, not Martin Donner, who is only a paradox or a metaphor, you must make that decision. It is the 40th day, he says. Soon it will be the 40th night. You must now turn in the way you must and there will be no returning.
BARNABY IN EXILE
Mike Resnick
Barnaby sits in his cage, waiting for Sally to come into the lab.
She will give him the puzzle, the same one he worked on yesterday. But today he will not disappoint her. He has been thinking about the puzzle all night. Thinking is fun. Today he will do it right, and she will laugh and tell him how smart he is. He will lay on his back and she will tickle his stomach, and say, “Oh, what a bright young fellow you are, Barnaby!” Then Barnaby will make a funny face and turn a somersault.
Barnaby is me.
#
It gets lonely after Sally leaves. Bud comes when it is black and cleans my cage, but he never talks. Sometimes he forgets and leaves the light on. Then I try to talk to Roger and his family, but they are just rabbits and cannot make the signs. I don’t think they are very smart, anyway.
Every night when Bud comes in I sit up and smile at him. I always make the sign for “Hello”, but he doesn’t answer. Sometimes I think Bud isn’t any smarter than Roger. He just pats me on the head. Sometimes he leaves the pictures on after he leaves.
My favorite pictures are Fred and Barney. Everything is so bright and fast. Many times I ask Sally to bring Dino to the lab so that I can play with him, but she never does. I like Barney, because he is not as big or loud as Fred, and I am not big or loud either. Also, my name is Barnaby and that is like Barney. Sometimes, when it is black and I am all alone, I imagine that I am Barney, and that I don’t sleep in a cage at all.
#
This day it was white out, and Sally e
ven had white on her when she came to the lab, but it all turned to water.
Today we had a new toy. It looks like the thing on Doctor’s desk, with lots of little things that look like flat grapes. Sally told me that she would show me something and then I should touch the grape that had the same picture on it. She showed me a shoe, and a ball, and an egg, and a star, and a square.
I did the egg and the ball wrong, but tomorrow I will do them right. I think more every day. Like Sally says I am a very bright young fellow.
#
We have spent many days with the new toy, and now I can speak to Sally with it, just by touching the right grapes.
She will come into the lab and say, “How are you this morning, Barnaby?”, and I will touch the grapes that say, “Barnaby is fine” or “Barnaby is hungry”.
What I really want to say is “Barnaby is lonely” but there is no grape for “lonely”.
#
Today I touch the grapes that say “Barnaby wants out”.
“Out of your cage?” she asks.
“Out there,” I sign. “Out in the white.”
“You would not like it.”
“I do not like the black when I am alone,” I sign. “I will like the white.”
“It is very cold,” she says, “and you are not used to it.”
“The white is very pretty,” I say. “Barnaby wants out.”
“The last time I let you out you hurt Roger,” she reminds me.
“I just wanted to touch him,” I say.