Was

by Geoff Ryman

  Crazy people talked crazy. It was like trying to grasp a handful of fog. You knew there was something there, but you couldn’t feel it or touch it.

  “And where was this?” he asked.

  The stare had come back too. Old Dotty was looking somewhere else.

  “In Was,” she said. “It’s a place too. You can step in and out of it. Never goes away. Always there.” She smiled a moment longer and then suddenly said, “My mama died.”

  “How did she die?”

  “I killed her,” said Dotty. “I gave her the Dip.”

  The great stretch of the years.

  “My daddy died,” said Bill. “He got killed in the war.”

  “There you go,” said Dotty, as if something had been proved.

  “It can leave you pretty lonely.” He was trying to understand.

  “No it can’t. People are the only thing that can make you feel lonely.” He felt corrected. Loneliness had never been his problem.

  “There’s the China people,” she added. “You got to watch out or they’ll break. Crr-asssshhhh.” She made a spreading, breaking sound.

  “Are…are you a China person?” he asked.

  Her mouth twisted around in exasperation. “Now do I look like it? I ask you!”

  “No,” he admitted cautiously. But he found he was smiling.

  “I told you,” she said. “I am a fairy.”

  Tom Heritage with the crooked smile happened to be passing. He grabbed Bill by the shoulders. “Well, he may not look like it, but he’s a fairy, too, Ma’am.”

  Joke. Hah hah. “Thanks for butting in, Heritage,” murmured Bill.

  “He is not a fairy,” insisted Dotty, suddenly fierce. She looked like a wrinkled old snapping turtle. “He’s a healer.” She looked back at Bill. “Just like Frank was,” she told him.

  “Well, when you get through healing, Bill, we got us some beds to strip.” Heritage’s eyebrows were raised with meaning. But he walked on.

  “I got to go, Dot,” said Bill.

  “I don’t see what’s stopping you,” said Old Dynamite.

  Bill stood up. “Who’s Frank?” he asked.

  “He was the Substitute,” said Dotty, as if Bill should have known. “Frank Balm.”

  Heritage was at the door, holding it open. “Substitute for what?” Bill asked, walking backward. Her face had gone immobile. “Dotty? Substitute for what?”

  She just kept smiling. She was gone. Bill was just at the door when he heard the answer to his question.

  “For home,” Dotty whispered.

  Bill took all of this home to Carol, and Carol was disturbed. What she loved in Bill was his normality. She had been trained to confuse that with virtue. What Bill was involved in now was nothing to do with normality.

  “I don’t want to hear any more,” she said, flustered. “It’s a lot of babbling from some crazy old woman.”

  “But it’s like it isn’t crazy,” he said. “It’s like it makes a certain kind of sense.”

  “Oh, Bill! Can’t we just forget it?”

  There were so many things to be done. Christmas was coming up, and Mrs. Davison was going to spend it with Carol’s family. After all, they were all going to be one family soon. And everybody in Waposage always had everybody else in for Christmas. That meant a cold hard clean of the house, and then Christmas decorations, and lights up along the eaves, maybe a Santa on the roof if you were really public-spirited, and taking relatives on long drives around the town and villages to look at the lights. And presents! Near enough everybody who came to the house had to have a present, not to mention all the stuff you had to get for Christmas morning. And after that, not two months later, there was the wedding.

  So why was he getting all wrapped up in some old lady? Because he’s a nice boy, that’s why. But that kind of niceness could get you down, if it went on too long, and that kind of niceness opened up a door that led to God knows where. That kind of niceness scared Carol to death.

  So they went about all their business, going from store to store, Carol’s arm in his, finding presents for brothers and sisters and cousins. Bill got a bit worked up about what to get his mother. He felt bad because he was leaving her at home, well, he would have to once they were married, but he wanted to get her something especially nice. Carol helped. She especially devoted herself to finding Mrs. Davison the perfect gift. “I think I’ve got it,” she said. “A home permanent kit!”

  He was a man and didn’t understand. “Look,” Carol explained patiently. “She doesn’t have one, and I know she likes going to the beauty parlor, she always just sits back and relaxes when she comes in. But every woman likes to think she can get her hair up for something special if she can’t get into the parlor. And look, this is a real good one. Comes with full instructions, rollers, the whole bit.”

  Bill really didn’t seem to understand what a great present it was.

  “I’m just worried it might make her feel more alone,” he said. “You know, staying in with her hair in rollers and no one to take her out.”

  “Look. We’ll get her the home permanent and something else. Hey, wait, I got it. A new dress for the wedding! Mrs. Harris just made her one, didn’t she? She’ll have the measurements. Oh, come on, Billy!”

  “Okay, okay, you win,” he said, smiling and holding up his hands.

  “Trust me,” said Carol.

  They picked up some stocking stuffers for the kids, and perfume for her mother, and went on to the hardware store for some new drill bits for Daddy. They passed the bookshop. “Hold on,” said Bill.

  “Since when,” asked Carol, following, “have you been interested in books?”

  Bill wasn’t. In fact, he had never been in a bookshop and felt very uncomfortable going into one. But the book was in the window.

  “That book in the window,” he asked, after waiting for ages behind people at the counter. “Is that the book they based that movie one?”

  “The one on TV? Yup,” said the salesgirl and waited.

  “Could you get it for me?” he asked, helpless.

  “Um. It’s just over there,” she replied, pointing. “I got to work the cash register.”

  “Oh. Sure.”

  He really did feel out of place, but he found the book. Carol rejoined him, with a few books for the relatives and the kids.

  “You’re buying that?” she asked him. Her mother was a librarian. “That’s supposed to be a real bad book for kids. None of the libraries will stock it. They don’t even list it in the guides and things.”

  He turned the book over in his hands. “Is it dirty or something?”

  “No. But the fantasy is unhealthy. Bad for the little ones.”

  “Well, it isn’t a present for a kid.”

  “Who is it for, then?”

  “It’s for Dotty.”

  Carol felt fear. “You’re buying that old mad lady a Christmas present?”

  “Somebody’s got to,” he said.

  He bought her The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. He looked at the name on the cover and felt that strange prickling again. Frank Baum. She had mentioned him. Did she really know him? Or was that too much of a coincidence?

  “How’s my girl?” Bill would ask Dotty in the mornings, when he arrived.

  “Oh, just fit as a fiddle,” she might reply. And then they would talk.

  “I just realized,” Dotty said one morning. “You boys call us Angels, don’t you? I used to make angels. Wilbur and me.”

  He understood now that Wilbur was a childhood friend. He also understood that Wilbur was often with her.

  “Has Wilbur come by again?” Bill asked.

  “Oh, he comes and sets a spell, just like you do,” Dotty told him. “He used to set all day by the road, just waiting to see who would happen by. Sometimes God did.”

  Bill was thrown for a moment. He coughed. “Anybody else come and visit?” he asked.

  “The Good Witch,” she said. “And the Bad Witch.”

  He felt
the prickling again. That was in the book. He’d read it. Most of it.

  “They’re the same person,” she confided, in a whisper.

  “Are you a good witch or a bad witch?” he asked.

  “Oh, I’m not a witch at all. I’m Dorothy Gael from Kansas. And that’s not East, and that’s not North, and that’s not South, and that’s not really even West. Kansas is nowhere at all.”

  “Right where everyplace else meets.”

  “Meets right here,” she said, and tapped her own head.

  Bill found he was piecing her world together. She had at some point obviously read the book and found it so much like her life that it got wound up in the strange world she lived in. There was, as far as he could gather, this other place she went to when she got the stare. And in that place she was happy, with lots of old friends, all together there. She only got mad when someone tried to pull her out of it. He knew better than to talk to her if she was too far lost in the stare. Or if reality had been too far pushed under her nose, and she wanted to go back to the place she called Was.

  And sometimes poison would jet out of her, as if from a wound.

  He said hello to her one morning. “Why you talking to me?” Dotty demanded. “You must have something better to do.” She shrugged herself deeper down into her own embrace.

  “I’m just visiting.”

  “Go visit somewhere else. I know what you’re after. All you men are just the same.”

  Then she said, “You’d pig-back Christ on the cross given half a chance.”

  “Dotty, there’s no call to talk to me like that.”

  “You wanna see? You wanna see? You wanna have a good look?” She said it in hatred. She started to pull her dress up. “Go on, then, have a look at a poor old lady.”

  Bill backed away. You had to make sure people saw you were nowhere near her. For legal reasons.

  “You know you do it to children. Go on. Look at a poor old lady. You can’t hurt her anymore with that thing of yours. Go on!”

  Bill had to walk away. He knew his face was white and he could feel his hands trembling. He had been shaken in the depths of his purity. She had been made so bitter! Bill could not imagine what could make anyone as full of bile as that. Except that it seemed to him that it must have come from something terrible that was done to her.

  The next day he saw her, and she laughed when she saw him and clapped her hands, like a child again.

  “I baked you a cake,” she would say. “A nice plum cake.” And she would move the invisible cake onto her tray and pretend to cut it.

  “How big a slice you want?”

  “As big as you can cut it.”

  “Oh!” she said. “I know you! You’d have me cut just a teeny piece for myself and give you the rest. I don’t know. Here you go.”

  And she passed him the cake on an invisible plate, and he would pretend to eat it.

  Tom Heritage passed by the bed. “Watch it, Billy,” said Heritage. “That’s the first sign.” He turned to Dotty. “How often does he eat cake that isn’t there?” he asked Dotty.

  “Only,” she insisted, “since he’s met me and I showed him how. Now he doesn’t ever have to go hungry. Would you like a slice?”

  “Uh. No thanks. Just had my invisible lunch,” said Tom.

  After Heritage had gone, Dotty said, with a sigh, “He’ll never leave Kansas.”

  Christmas bore down on them like an express train, jamming all the days together. Billy put up lights on his mother’s house for the last time. He and Carol were at a party every night, with relatives or friends. Their high-school class had a Christmas reunion party. Six months after graduation, everybody was pretty much the same, except for a couple of the brainy kids who went away to college. Muffy Havis was there. Billy wanted to talk to her because she was studying psychology. He tried to talk to her about Dotty.

  He loomed toward her. He and Muffy Havis had never spoken much. Muffy had grouped him together with the rest of the huge and popular athletes of the school. She called them the Dumb Oxen.

  His hands did most of the talking, as if trying to pull words out of the air. He talked about some patient in the Home, a few scraps of her conversation; some problem she had with the television.

  “What’s the diagnosis been?” Muffy asked him. “Schizophrenic?”

  “I don’t know,” he said, and smiled his big, dumb, sweet smile.

  “It’s a bit early in the course for me to give a diagnosis,” she said wryly. She was amazed Bill Davison was interested. It made her feel on edge.

  “What…what kind of things do you study?” Bill Davison asked her. “Do they help you understand people better?”

  “No,” admitted Muffy quite cheerfully.

  Muffy Havis liked classical music and read all kinds of things and had not been terribly popular. She was hefty and pale and had her hair pulled back into a plain ponytail. Being asked unanswerable questions by one of the Dumb Oxen was not something she enjoyed.

  “I sure wish I could understand Dotty better.”

  Really? Muffy thought. Or did you think everything would be as open and straightforward as playing football and getting drunk with your cronies? Muffy wished she had not come. She was tired of realizing that there was not a single person in her high-school class that she could call a friend.

  And here came Carol Gilbert, blond hair, curls, bright smile; she’s going to be oh so gracious and get him away from me. Oh, come on, Carol, this is Muffy, remember? You don’t have to be jealous of me. Plain old Muffy. Aren’t you going to pretend to be nice to me?

  “What are you two finding to talk about?” Carol asked.

  “Psychology,” said Muffy.

  “That’s all he talks about these days since that job of his.” Carol was smiling and dancing in place to get away.

  “Maybe he should go into insurance,” said Muffy, coolly.

  “Something sensible like that,” agreed Carol.

  There are two kinds of stupid people, thought Muffy. The nice ones and the shrewd nasty ones. And both kinds come out on top.

  Bill Davison murmured something. Muffy wasn’t sure, but she thought it was “All-fired rush to be sensible.”

  “What was that, honey?” asked Carol, leaning forward. Oooh, thought Muffy. Trouble in the ranks.

  Bill didn’t answer. Instead he looked up straight into Muffy’s eyes, big, dumb and not so sensible after all. “I’d really like to talk some more about this,” he said. “Now’s not really the time. Can I drop by while you’re still in town?”

  “Uh. Sure,” said Muffy. What the hell, she thought, is happening?

  “Maybe you could come out and see her.”

  “What? In the Home? Uh. Okay.” Muffy looked to Carol, signaling: This is none of my doing.

  “Give you a call,” said Bill Davison. A football star, interested in me? Muffy maintained her quizzical expression.

  “See ya, Muffy,” said Carol, pulling at Bill’s sleeve. She even gave her a dinky little wave with the tips of her fingers. Muffy gave her a dinky wave back. It’s not you, Muff. It’s that old woman he cares about. How strange.

  People, Muffy decided. They really do grow up sometimes.

  And, she thought, he really is sweet. Not to mention rather toothsome.

  And sometime about mid-December, before Bill had a chance to call on Muffy, it snowed. A good hefty Kansas snowfall, in time for Christmas. It started about lunchtime. Bill was cleaning the tables and fixing trays. Some of the patients needed feeding. Dotty came running in. Her feet couldn’t leave the ground, but she made a hurried, hopping motion with her hands and head.

  “Billy. Billy,” she said. “Come and see the snow.”

  She pulled him to the window. Great fat lumps of snow were falling like flakes of lard.

  “God’s dandruff,” she announced.

  Bill laughed out loud.

  “Angel feathers. They’re cleaning out the roost upstairs, making room for a few more.”

 
“Dotty…” he said, shaking his head. He was going to say, You are out of your mind. It was what he said to anyone who made him laugh out loud.

  “The snow’s warm,” she said. “The Eskimos make their houses out of it. They live in great snow cities, with snow skyscrapers, but nobody can see them because they mix right in with everything else. So the airplanes go over, and never notice. So it’s all right. The Eskimos are safe. Nobody’s going to touch them.”

  She gave her head a determined nod.

  “Ride around on polar bears,” she told him.

  “Hell,” she said, her voice suddenly different. “I used to sleep under snow six months out of every year. Snow’s always been good to me. Let’s go out.”

  “Can’t, Dotty.”

  “Why not?”

  “Rules,” he said. “Besides, you haven’t got a coat.”

  “You don’t need a coat in the snow. I told you, the snow is warm!”

  “Dotty. I can’t let you out in it.”

  Her face went small and mean. She looked at him accusingly. “You’re one of them,” she said. “You’re one of them!”

  “Come on, Dotty, it’s lunchtime. Let’s have some food.”

  She snarled at him and threw off his hand.

  “I’m not your servant,” she growled. “I don’t have to kowtow to the likes of you.”

  She held out her hand flat. “You can’t do anything to me,” she said. “Go on. Hit me! Hit me! You think that will stop me!” Her voice went down into a whisper. “I am the Happy One,” she told him. “I come to avenge murder.”

  She walked away, flinging her hands around her head. “Hit me! Come on! Hit me! Doesn’t hurt. Doesn’t hurt. They make us tough. They make us tough in Kansas.” She walked toward the doors shouting, outraged.

  “They sport us till we’re as tough as old boots. They’d stick their things up Jesus Christ Himself and make their wives lick off the holy blessed shit from Jesus’s holy, blessed asshole.”

  The doors swung shut behind her. The tirade went on, echoing, horrible, down the corridor. Was it okay just to let her go?

  “Then they stick their knives up our sweet little dewlaps and rip them open and hang them from hooks until we dry in the sun and then they call us beef jerky and we clack and clatter when we walk, gutless, flies in the intestines. Oh, no! It’s not just enough to kill us! No! Never enough just to make us die.”