Was

by Geoff Ryman

  Old Dynamite came lumbering forward too, like some stick insect on long prairie pins, in her Home pj’s, smelling slightly of sweat and dry-cleaned sheets. She staggered toward one of the children.

  “Hello, hello,” she said in a breathless but supple voice. “Hello children. Hello my little ones.”

  “Mo-mmmie!” wailed one of the children, in fear, and turned her face toward her mother.

  “I told you, Hattie,” said the mother. “I said you was to be nice to the old people.”

  “Now aren’t you the prettiest little thing!” said Dotty, with longing and bad breath. The child covered her mouth, shrank back into her mother’s arms.

  “Sunflowers,” said Dotty. “You like sunflowers, honey?”

  The child stared at her with sullen dislike.

  “Well,” whispered the old woman. “Their real name is moonflowers.”

  Bill smiled at the mother to let her know that nothing was wrong. “Come along, Dotty, it’s about to start,” he said, across the room.

  “Do you like Indians? I’ll tell you a secret, honey. The Indians won. They’re everywhere, but they’re just invisible.”

  Bill walked among the old people, gently guiding them away from the children, into chairs. They should have realized the effect that seeing children would have. None of them had seen children in so long.

  “And taffy apples,” Old Dynamite was saying. “Oh, I used to like those. They pull out my teeth now.”

  Bill was next to her, lulled by the normality of her voice. Bill still thought normality was hardly to be breached. He touched Old Dynamite’s arm, to lead her away.

  The insanity came leaping out of her. Her face twisted up, and she hissed at him like a snake and threw off his hand with clumsy, sweeping strength. She staggered backward and nearly fell over. Bill felt something in him leap back with fear. Her back stiff with pride, Dynamite began to walk by herself toward an empty wheelchair.

  The child’s mother shifted her body and the subject, looking away from the old insane woman. “I don’t know why they have to put on a kids’ movie this time of night,” she said to her buddy from the kitchens. She had been hoping all the Angels would be asleep, so her little Hattie need not be frightened. She was bitter about being poor and what it cost her little girl.

  That’ll teach me, thought Bill. Looks sweet, but she’s in here for a reason. I reckon Old Dynamite could still be quite an ornery handful. Some rough old pioneer lady who went mad.

  They had their first bad reaction to the TV that night. Wasn’t more than five minutes into the movie when Old Dotty stood up and shouted. “Who put this on?” she demanded. Bill moved quickly. He put a hand on her shoulder.

  “Just sit still, Dotty,” said Bill, trying to soothe her.

  “How’d it get there?” she shouted, loud. “That’s me. How did I get there?”

  “It’s just a movie, Dotty.”

  “Who said they could put me on that thing? They got it wrong! Wasn’t like that. Only one room we had and couldn’t afford no hired hands, I can tell you.”

  The woman from the kitchen made clicking sounds of disapproval. Did everything have to be ruined for her little girl?

  “It’s just a movie, Dotty,” said Bill.

  “What is that thing?” She pointed to the television.

  “It’s a TV. It’s like a radio with pictures. You can show old movies on it. That’s what that is, an old movie.”

  For some reason, that seemed to mollify Dotty. She dropped back down onto her chair, sulking, arms folded. “I ain’t never seen a movie,” she said, as though that might explain how she came to be in one. She sat looking merely disgruntled for a few minutes more.

  Then the cyclone came. When the wind began to moan, Old Dotty began to shake her head from side to side, no, no, no. She looked confused; her hair was wild but her eyes looked frightened and lost. When she finally saw it was a cyclone, she shouted, once, very loudly, and covered her mouth. And when Judy Garland stepped out of Kansas into Oz, Old Dotty covered her face and wept. She pulled in breath with great heaving sobs. The little girl began to cry too.

  “I want to go home!” said the little girl.

  The mother began to gather up her coat in a rage. “Just for once,” she muttered in bitterness.

  “I want to go home,” echoed Dotty, so softly that only Bill could hear.

  “Come on, Dotty,” he murmured. Experimentally he wheeled the chair around. Dotty did not fight. She had gone still and staring, her head hanging slightly. Bill wheeled her down the corridor to where the Angels slept.

  “Here we are,” said Bill. “Back home.”

  Old Dynamite didn’t fight as he helped her up onto the bed and lifted her feet around, pulling up the bars of the cot. She turned her old seeping head with staring, watery eyes onto the pillow as he tucked her under the quilt. She’s peaceful now, Bill thought. Getting her to go to the john will only rile her up. I’ll clean her in the morning, before anyone sees.

  “You just sleep now, Dotty,” he whispered. He patted her arm, helpless to offer anything. He began to walk back quietly toward the lighted window in the door.

  “Take me to the ocean,” said Dotty.

  Bill stopped and turned. Did she want to say anything else? He waited. There was a silence for a while. He was about to go again when she said, “I ain’t never seen the sea.”

  “We’re a long way from the sea, Dotty,” he whispered back to her.

  “I’d like to see the ocean,” she said. “And then I’d like to die.”

  What could he tell her? That he’d take her there in the morning? That things were going to get better? That anything good was ever likely to happen to her now?

  “They show the ocean on TV, sometimes,” he said.

  “I ain’t no use to anybody. You oughta take me to the sea and drown me.”

  “I don’t think that would be a very good idea.”

  Two beds down, old Gertie began to moan.

  “If we keep talking, we’ll wake everybody up. I’ll come visit tomorrow,” he said.

  “It was about me,” she whispered. “I really am Dorothy. Dorothy Gael, from Kansas.”

  The skin at the back of Bill’s neck prickled. My, but that’s spooky. That’s what the character just said in the film.

  Better say nothing, he thought. He walked out of the room backward. Better let her sleep.

  He shuddered, involuntarily, and tried to calm himself. Whew. Must have been strange for her. Never seen a movie. Been in here since before movies. So she didn’t know what they’re like. So she sees an old movie that starts in Kansas about a little girl on a farm, must be like her own life coming back. He listened to his own footfalls, soft-shoed, on the corridor.

  He went back to the TV, dreading that maybe someone had knocked it over and got hurt. Everything was fine. Bill leaned over to Jackson, the black janitor. He’d been working in the Home for an age.

  “Jack,” he said, “what’s Old Dotty’s real name?”

  “Don’t know,” said Jackson. “Don’t know their names, mostly. They got files on them all, though.”

  Wouldn’t it be strange, though, if the names really were the same?

  Bill drove the car home, and it all seemed to get stranger and stranger, the more he thought about it. Say she was about eighty. She could have been sent here when she was thirty and that would be about 1900. She could have been in here all that time. A whole world would have gone by. The Wright brothers, movies. And both world wars. It’s like when they had Veterans Day parades, when he was a kid, and some old guys would come tottering along with their decorations, and they’d be decorations from the Spanish-American War. You had to pinch yourself to realize that there were people who could remember the Spanish-American War.

  He needed to talk to Carol. He drove to her house, breathing the smell of the car heater. He parked and ran through the cold to the front door. Lights were still on downstairs. He rang the bell and waited, stomping his feet,
waving his hands.

  “Is Carol up, Mrs. Gilbert?”

  “Why yes, come in, Bill. Anything wrong?” The door was speedily closed behind him.

  “No, I’d just like to talk to her.”

  “Sure,” smiled Mrs. Gilbert. It was hard for the young people when they were almost married to have to go bouncing back and forth between houses. “Carol?” she called upstairs. “Bill’s here.”

  Carol Gilbert knew herself to be lucky. She had the boy she wanted. Everything about it was just perfect. Everybody thought so, even her parents. Even her mother, who left the two of them alone with a cup of coffee each in the living room.

  He looked up at her and Carol reminded herself how good-looking he was, how reliable, how nice. He needed to talk, so Carol listened, like you were supposed to do. He talked to Carol about some old lady in the Home.

  “You can’t let it get to you like this, Billy,” said Carol, stroking the hair at the back of his neck.

  “It’s just she’s been in there so long. Can you imagine how strange that must feel?”

  “You can’t imagine how she feels and neither can I. It’s sad, Billy, but she went mad and had to be put away.”

  “She asked me to drown her.” Bill looked down at his big hands that could so easily kill.

  He was so nice. Big and handsome and sweet. Carol took the back of his neck in both of her hands and pulled him to her and kissed him. She thought of the life they were going to have together. May not be rich, but we’ll be happy. Why couldn’t he just fix his mind on that?

  “Anyway,” said Carol, “tomorrow’s Sunday. We can go looking for the house again.”

  “Oh!” said Bill, but it was a groan. “I promised I’d go talk to her tomorrow.”

  “Well,” sighed Carol. “You got a choice. Me or an old mad lady.”

  He tried to smile and gave her a quick and slightly dismissive little kiss.

  “How long you got before the Army?” she asked. She would hate being alone.

  “Just a couple of months, I guess. Still haven’t had my notice.”

  “Well,” said Carol firmly. “We have got plenty to do before then.” The wedding was going to be before then, and that too would be just perfect.

  On Monday morning, Bill ran up the steps of the Home. He’d had an idea.

  First he went to see Dotty. She sat in a wheelchair with her beautiful smile focused far away.

  “Good morning, Dotty,” he said. “This is Bill.”

  She didn’t respond.

  “Remember me? After the TV show.”

  She began to hum nervously, in a high, frail, barely audible voice, shutting him out. That old song again.

  Bill knelt by her chair and hung his head. A fine help you’ve been, Bill Davison. Between you and that television that got brought in here because of you, this old lady is worse than ever.

  “I’m sorry, Dotty,” he told her, whispering. He didn’t want anyone else on the staff to hear. People had been fired for caring too much.

  Then he went to see Gwen Anderson in Admin.

  Gwenny was one of his mother’s many friends, a funny little widowed lady whose conversation Bill permitted himself to find tedious. It ran in a tight repetitive circle of cooking and homemaking. He had not visited Gwen since coming to work at the Home, and he felt bad about that. He felt worse now. He was going to ask a favor of her.

  It was a bit better when he saw her. She let him off easy.

  “Bill!” she exclaimed. “Hiya, honey. You haven’t been to see me. I was just telling your mother.”

  “Oh. You know how it is. There’s so much stuff to be done before the wedding and all.”

  Bill felt guilty again. He talked to her about the church’s Christmas plans, and about the seat covers his mother was making for her, and how delicious her lemon sponge was. He also talked about the wedding, though he was surprised at how little he had to say about it. So was Gwenny. There was just a little lurch in her face as he ran out of things to tell her.

  “Well, a February wedding will be such a treat,” she said. “It’ll come just when it seems that winter will never end. You must be real happy.”

  “Real happy, yeah,” said Bill. “Carol’s a good girl.”

  “I bet,” said Gwenny. Her glasses seemed to smile for her.

  And finally, Bill felt able to say, “Gwen, there’s a patient here and I feel real sorry for her. Any chance that there’d be a file on her or something? I’d really like to know a bit more about her.”

  Gwenny was only too pleased to help. The files were supposed to be confidential but there wasn’t an untrustworthy bone in Bill Davison’s body. The file was big and fat. Bill could sit there in the office since the boss was late. Gwenny unfolded the wax paper around the white bread sandwiches that she took to work in place of breakfast. Breakfast made her feel sick. She ate daintily as Bill read.

  Old Dynamite’s name really was Dorothy Gale, or rather Gael. The spelling was different. That’s what the latest reports said, but maybe they were wrong. Bill went all the way back through limp brown folders to the oldest layer of papers. There was a stiff shiny folder, with printed scrolls and lettering with leaves intertwined. Waposage Home for the Mentally Incapacitated, it said. There was a paper dated 1899:

  Subject is well known to local people in the Abilene area under a variety of names and is a known vagrant thought to sleep in rough places including outbuildings or railway sheds. It is thought that she survives through petty theft from orchards and gardens, though it is thought she spent some years in and around Wichita. Records there do show a registration of a Dorothy Gael as a “singer” and common prostitute. She has shown belligerence and violence to officers of the law and is regarded by some people as a public menace. Apprehended in the course of a theft, she attacked a woman in Abilene and has been convicted of causing an affray in the same town. It was the recommendation of the judge that the woman be taken into state care for her own sake and for the sake of the community.

  Subject shows some signs of religious mania. She frequently quotes Scriptures and sings hymns in a garbled and sometimes sacrilegious fashion. Her own hard experiences and corrupt nature make a bitter mockery of the sacred words, denying all comfort and salvation. Her oaths are such to blast the ear of the most hardened habitué of lowlife, entwining the Savior and lustful remarks in one evil net.

  When not excited by theft or song, the subject is frequently to be found in a kind of trance that suggests alcohol poisoning or the more extreme forms of withdrawal noted in patients of this kind. In care she can sit without movement of any kind for hours. But do not be fooled, for she is capable of flaring up suddenly in a mighty rage, during which the stoutest men in the establishment have difficulty restraining her. Care will need to be taken to make sure the patient, whose hard life seems only to have served to make her physically strong, is kept under a degree of restraint.

  She is a woman lost to the world, to sense, and to God.

  Bill folded the file shut and sat and stared. Maybe, he thought, there are some things you can’t go into too deeply. There’s no help for them and no solace. Common prostitute. Blast the ear of the most hardened habitué. It was like staring into the pit. So where did the beautiful smile come from?

  “Thanks, Gwen,” he murmured darkly, and passed the file back to her.

  “These people, Bill,” she said, “they’re like the rocks. You can dash yourself to pieces against them, and it won’t help.”

  That’s what everyone says, Bill thought as he smiled to Gwenny and thanked her. Everybody says don’t get too wrapped up in them. But God, God commands us to love everyone. God says to find the lamb that is lost. And all these good people are telling me to forget, just close the file and put it away.

  He went back to Dotty and pulled up a chair and sat next to her.

  “You used to be a singer,” he said.

  There was a pause. “Yup,” she answered him, abruptly.

  A silence. Where t
o go from here?

  “Where did you sing?” he asked, after having to think.

  “Church,” she said, and drew herself up and sniffed. Another long silence. “Nobody ever told me I could sing. Nobody ever asked me to sing. I just found out. So I’d sleep in one town and go to church in another. Sing in the choir. Till they found out who I was. Drove me out.”

  “Drove you out?” He was appalled.

  Dotty didn’t answer. Her jaw jutted out, and she jerked it in decrepit defiance. She pretended to brush something off her knee. “Couldn’t have the likes of me singing in church.”

  Let those of you who are without sin…

  “That wasn’t very Christian of them,” he said.

  “Totally and completely Christian,” she answered him. “Look what they did to the Indians.”

  He had a sudden strange feeling that Dotty had seen what had happened to the Indians.

  “How old are you, Dotty?” he asked.

  “Five,” she replied. “Took a look around and decided to stay five. I just grew up five, and lived five.”

  The smile came flitting back across her face like a swallow over a cornfield. “I was a fairy,” she whispered. “I lived in the fields, under the leaves. I had a laugh like broken glass.” She nodded her head. Then she leaned forward.

  “All of us here,” she whispered, “are either Indians or fairies.” She nodded again.

  “Did you ever see any Indians?”

  “Only good, Kansas ones. The ones that sleep all day drunk. Those are good Indians. The bad ones are invisible.”

  “What kind of house did you live in?”

  “Underground. Wilbur lived underground, and he went first, and I followed him. We lived underground with the gophers. And Uncle Henry and Aunty Em, they lived in a cottonwood house that let all the wind in. It was better to live underground.”

  “What year was that? Do you remember what year?”

  “No, I didn’t know the year. That was why I felt so stupid. After that, I didn’t need to know the year. Each year is the same year. All you got. Right now.”