The Winds of Marble Arch and Other Stories

by Connie Willis

  “Where do you think you’re going?” Solveig said, planting herself firmly in front of me.

  “To a meeting,” I said, trying not to look as lame and frightened as the hero’s girlfriend in the movies always did. She looked down at my sneakers. “Across town.”

  “You’re not going anywhere,” she said.

  “Why not?” I said weakly.

  “Because I’ve got to show you what I bought Jane for Christmas.”

  She reached for a shopping bag under her desk. “I know I’m not due till May, but I couldn’t resist this,” she said, rummaging in the bag. “It is so cute!”

  She pulled out a tiny pink bonnet with white daisies on it. “Isn’t it adorable?” she said. “It’s newborn size. She can wear it home from the hospital. Oh, and I got her the cutest—”

  “I lied,” I said, and Solveig looked up alertly. “Don’t tell anybody, but I completely forgot to buy a Secret Santa gift. Penny’ll kill me if she finds out. If anybody asks where I’ve gone, tell them the ladies’ room,” I said, and took off down to first.

  The thermostat was right by the door. I disabled it and the one in the basement, got my car (looking in the backseat first, unlike the people in the movies) and drove to the courthouse and the hospital and McDonald’s, and then called my mother and invited myself to dinner. “I’ll bring dessert,” I said, drove out to the mall, and hit the bakery, the Gap, the video-rental place, and the theater multiplex on the way.

  Mom didn’t have the TV on. She did have the hat on that Sueann had given her. “Don’t you think it’s adorable?” she said.

  “I brought cheesecake,” I said. “Have you heard from Allison and Mitch? How’s Dakota?”

  “Worse,” she said. “She has these swellings on her knees and ankles. The doctors don’t know what’s causing them.” She took the cheesecake into the kitchen, limping slightly. “I’m so worried.”

  I turned up the thermostats in the living room and the bedroom and was plugging the space heater in when she brought in the soup. “I got chilled on the way over,” I said, turning the space heater up to high. “It’s freezing out. I think it’s going to snow.”

  We ate our soup, and Mom told me about Sueann’s wedding. “She wants you to be her maid of honor,” she said, fanning herself. “Aren’t you warm yet?”

  “No,” I said, rubbing my arms.

  “I’ll get you a sweater,” she said, and went into the bedroom, turning the space heater off as she went.

  I turned it back on and went into the living room to build a fire in the fireplace.

  “Have you met anyone at work lately?” she called in from the bedroom.

  “What?” I said, sitting back on my knees.

  She came back in without the sweater. Her hat was gone, and her hair was mussed up, as if something had thrashed around in it. “I hope you’re not still refusing to write a Christmas newsletter,” she said, going into the kitchen and coming out again with two plates of cheesecake. “Come sit down and eat your dessert,” she said.

  I did, still watching her warily.

  “Making up things!” she said. “What an idea! Aunt Margaret wrote me just the other day to tell me how much she loves hearing from you girls and how interesting your newsletters always are.” She cleared the table. “You can stay for a while, can’t you? I hate waiting here alone for news about Dakota.”

  “No, I’ve got to go,” I said, and stood up. “I’ve got to…”

  I’ve got to…what? I thought, feeling suddenly overwhelmed. Fly to Spokane? And then, as soon as Dakota was okay, fly back and run wildly around town turning up thermostats until I fell over from exhaustion? And then what? It was when people fell asleep in the movies that the aliens took them over. And there was no way I could stay awake until every parasite was exposed to the light, even if they didn’t catch me and turn me into one of them. Even if I didn’t turn my ankle.

  The phone rang.

  “Tell them I’m not here,” I said.

  “Who?” Mom asked, picking it up. “Oh, dear, I hope it’s not Mitch with bad news. Hello?” Pause. “It’s Sueann,” she said, putting her hand over the receiver, and listened for a long interval. “She broke up with her boyfriend.”

  “With David?” I said. “Give me the phone.”

  “I thought you said you weren’t here,” she said, handing the phone over.

  “Sueann?” I said. “Why did you break up with David?”

  “Because he’s so deadly dull,” she said. “He’s always calling me and sending me flowers and being nice. He even wants to get married. And tonight at dinner, I just thought, ‘Why am I dating him?’ and we broke up.”

  Mom went over and turned on the TV. “In local news,” the CNN guy said, “special-interest groups banded together to donate fifteen thousand dollars to City Hall’s Christmas display.”

  “Where were you having dinner?” I asked Sueann. “At McDonald’s?”

  “No, at this pizza place, which is another thing. All he ever wants is to go to dinner or the movies. We never do anything interesting.”

  “Did you go to a movie tonight?” She might have been in the multiplex at the mall.

  “No. I told you, I broke up with him.”

  This made no sense. I hadn’t hit any pizza places.

  “Weather is next,” the guy on CNN said.

  “Mom, can you turn that down?” I said. “Sueann, this is important. Tell me what you’re wearing.”

  “Jeans and my blue top and my zodiac necklace. What does that have to do with my breaking up with David?”

  “Are you wearing a hat?”

  “In our forecast just ahead,” the CNN guy said, “great weather for all you people trying to get your Christmas shopping d—”

  Mom turned the TV down.

  “Mom, turn it back up,” I said, motioning wildly

  “No, I’m not wearing a hat,” Sueann said. “What does that have to do with whether I broke up with David or not?”

  The weather map behind the CNN guy was covered with 62, 65, 70, 68. “Mom,” I said.

  She fumbled with the remote.

  “You won’t believe what he did the other day,” Sueann said, outraged. “Gave me an engagement ring! Can you imag—”

  “—unseasonably warm temperatures and lots of sunshine,” the weather guy blared out. “Continuing right through Christmas.”

  “I mean, what was I thinking?” Sueann said.

  “Shh,” I said. “I’m trying to listen to the weather.”

  “It’s supposed to be nice all next week,” Mom said.

  It was nice all the next week. Allison called to tell me Dakota was back home. “The doctors don’t know what it was, some kind of bug or something, but whatever it was, it’s completely gone. She’s back taking ice skating and tap-dancing lessons, and next week I’m signing both girls up for junior Band.”

  “You did the right thing,” Gary said grudgingly. “Marcie told me her knee was really hurting. When she was still talking to me, that is.”

  “The reconciliation’s off, huh?”

  “Yeah,” he said, “but I haven’t given up. The way she acted proves to me that her love for me is still there, if I can only reach it.”

  All it proved to me was that it took an invasion from outer space to make her seem even marginally human, but I didn’t say so.

  “I’ve talked her into going into marriage counseling with me,” he said. “You were right not to trust me either. That’s the mistake they always make in those body-snatcher movies, trusting people.”

  Well, yes and no. If I’d trusted Jim Bridgeman, I wouldn’t have had to do all those thermostats alone.

  “You were the one who turned the heat up at the pizza place where Sueann and her fiancé were having dinner,” I said after Jim told me he’d figured out what the aliens’ weakness was after seeing me turn up the thermostat on fifth. “You were the one who’d checked out Attack of the Soul Killers.”

  “I tried to talk to
you,” he said. “I don’t blame you for not trusting me. I should have taken my hat off, but I didn’t want you to see my bald spot.”

  “You can’t go by appearances,” I said.

  By December fifteenth, hat sales were down, the mall was jammed with ill-tempered shoppers, at City Hall an animal-rights group was protesting Santa Claus’s wearing fur, and Gary’s wife had skipped their first marriage-counseling session and then blamed it on him.

  It’s now four days till Christmas, and things are completely back to normal. Nobody at work’s wearing a hat except Jim, Solveig’s naming her baby Durango, Hunziger’s suing management for firing him, antidepressant sales are up, and my mother called just now to tell me Sueann has a new boyfriend who’s a terrorist, and to ask me if I’d sent out my Christmas newsletters yet. And had I met anyone lately at work.

  “Yes,” I said. “I’m bringing him to Christmas dinner.”

  Yesterday Betty Holland filed a sexual harassment suit against Nathan Steinberg for kissing her under the mistletoe, and I was nearly run over on my way home from work. But the world has been made safe from cankers, leaf wilt, and galls.

  And it makes an interesting Christmas Newsletter.

  Whether it’s true or not.

  Wishing you and yours a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year,

  Nan Johnson

  Travel Guides

  Fire Watch

  History hath triumphed over time, which besides it nothing but eternity hath triumphed over.

  —Sir Walter Raleigh

  September 20—Of course the first thing I looked for was the fire watch stone. And of course it wasn’t there yet. It wasn’t dedicated until 1951, accompanying speech by the Very Reverend Dean Walter Matthews, and this is only 1940. I knew that. I went to see the fire watch stone only yesterday, with some kind of misplaced notion that seeing the scene of the crime would somehow help. It didn’t.

  The only things that would have helped were a crash course in London during the Blitz and a little more time. I had not gotten either.

  “Traveling in time is not like taking the tube, Mr. Bartholomew,” the esteemed Dunworthy had said, blinking at me through those antique spectacles of his. “Either you report on the twentieth or you don’t go at all.”

  “But I’m not ready,” I’d said. “Look, it took me four years to get ready to travel with St. Paul. St. Paul. Not St. Paul’s. You can’t expect me to get ready for London in the Blitz in two days.”

  “Yes,” Dunworthy had said. “We can.” End of conversation.

  “Two days!” I had shouted at my roommate Kivrin. “All because some computer adds an ’s. And the esteemed Dunworthy doesn’t even bat an eye when I tell him. ‘Time travel is not like taking the tube, young man,’ he says. ‘I’d suggest you get ready. You’re leaving day after tomorrow.’ The man’s a total incompetent.”

  “No,” she said. “He isn’t. He’s the best there is. He wrote the book on St. Paul’s. Perhaps you should listen to what he says.”

  I had expected Kivrin to be at least a little sympathetic. She had been practically hysterical when she got her practicum changed from fifteenth-to fourteenth-century England, and how did either century qualify as a practicum? Even counting infectious diseases they couldn’t have been more than a five. The Blitz is an eight, and St. Paul’s itself is, with my luck, a ten.

  “You think I should go see Dunworthy again?” I said.

  “Yes.”

  “And then what? I’ve got two days. I don’t know the money, the language, the history. Nothing.”

  “He’s a good man,” Kivrin said. “I think you’d better listen to him while you can.” Good old Kivrin. Always the sympathetic ear.

  The good man was responsible for my standing just inside the propped-open west doors, gawking like the country boy I was supposed to be, looking for a stone that wasn’t there. Thanks to the good man, I was about as unprepared for my practicum as it was possible for him to make me.

  I couldn’t see more than a few feet into the church. I could see a candle gleaming feebly a long way off and a closer blur of white moving toward me. A verger, or possibly the Very Reverend Dean himself. I pulled out the letter from my clergyman uncle in Wales that was supposed to gain me access to the dean, and patted my back pocket to make sure I hadn’t lost the microfiche Oxford English Dictionary, Revised, with Historical Supplements, I’d smuggled out of the Bodleian. I couldn’t pull it out in the middle of the conversation, but with luck I could muddle through the first encounter by context and look up the words I didn’t know later.

  “Are you from the ayarpee?” he said. He was no older than I am, a head shorter and much thinner. Almost ascetic looking. He reminded me of Kivrin. He was not wearing white, but clutching it to his chest. In other circumstances I would have thought it was a pillow. In other circumstances I would know what was being said to me, but there had been no time to unlearn sub-Mediterranean Latin and Jewish law and learn Cockney and air raid procedures. Two days, and the esteemed Dunworthy, who wanted to talk about the sacred burdens of the historian instead of telling me what the ayarpee was.

  “Are you?” he demanded again

  I considered whipping out the OED after all on the grounds that Wales was a foreign country, but I didn’t think they had microfilm in 1940. Ayarpee. It could be anything, including a nickname for the fire watch, in which case the impulse to say no was not safe at all. “No,” I said.

  He lunged suddenly toward and past me and peered out the open doors. “Damn,” he said, coming back to me. “Where are they then? Bunch of lazy bourgeois tarts!” And so much for getting by on context.

  He looked at me closely, suspiciously, as if he thought I was only pretending not to be with the ayarpee. “The church is closed,” he said finally.

  I held up the envelope and said, “My name’s Bartholomew. Is Dean Matthews in?”

  He looked out the door a moment longer as if he expected the lazy bourgeois tarts at any moment and intended to attack them with the white bundle; then he turned and said, as if he were guiding a tour, “This way, please,” and took off into the gloom.

  He led me to the right and down the south aisle of the nave. Thank God I had memorized the floor plan or at that moment, heading into total darkness, led by a raving verger, the whole bizarre metaphor of my situation would have been enough to send me out the west doors and back to St. John’s Wood. It helped a little to know where I was. We should have been passing number twenty-six: Hunt’s painting of “The Light of the World”—Jesus with his lantern—but it was too dark to see it. We could have used the lantern ourselves.

  He stopped abruptly ahead of me, still raving. “We weren’t asking for the bloody savoy, just a few cots. Nelson’s better off than we are—at least he’s got a pillow provided.” He brandished the white bundle like a torch in the darkness. It was a pillow after all. “We asked for them over a fortnight ago, and here we still are, sleeping on the bleeding generals from Trafalgar because those bitches want to play tea and crumpets with the tommies at Victoria and the hell with us!”

  He didn’t seem to expect me to answer his outburst, which was good, because I had understood perhaps one key word in three. He stomped on ahead, moving out of sight of the one pathetic altar candle and stopping again at a black hole. Number twenty-five: stairs to the Whispering Gallery, the Dome, the library (not open to the public). Up the stairs, down a hall, stop again at a medieval door and knock.

  “I’ve got to go wait for them,” he said. “If I’m not there they’ll likely take them over to the Abbey. Tell the Dean to ring them up again, will you?” and he took off down the stone steps, still holding his pillow like a shield against him.

  He had knocked, but the door was at least a foot of solid oak, and it was obvious the Very Reverend Dean had not heard. I was going to have to knock again. Yes, well, and the man holding the pinpoint had to let go of it, too, but even knowing it will all be over in a moment and you won’t feel a thing doesn’t
make it any easier to say, “Now!” So I stood in front of the door, cursing the history department and the esteemed Dunworthy and the computer that had made the mistake and brought me here to this dark door with only a letter from a fictitious uncle that I trusted no more than I trusted the rest of them.

  Even the old reliable Bodleian had let me down. The batch of research stuff I cross-ordered through Balliol and the main terminal is probably sitting in my room right now, a century out of reach. And Kivrin, who had already done her practicum and should have been bursting with advice, walked around as silent as a saint until I begged her to help me.

  “Did you go to see Dunworthy?” she said.

  “Yes. You want to know what priceless bit of information he had for me? ‘Silence and humility are the sacred burdens of the historian.’ He also told me I would love St. Paul’s. Golden gems from the Master. Unfortunately, what I need to know are the times and places of the bombs so one doesn’t fall on me.” I flopped down on the bed. “Any suggestions?”

  “How good are you at memory retrieval?” she said.

  I sat up. “I’m pretty good. You think I should assimilate?”

  “There isn’t time for that,” she said. “I think you should put everything you can directly into long-term.”

  “You mean endorphins?” I said.

  The biggest problem with using memory-assistance drugs to put information into your long-term memory is that it never sits, even for a microsecond, in your short-term memory, and that makes retrieval complicated, not to mention unnerving. It gives you the most unsettling sense of déjâ vu to suddenly know something you’re positive you’ve never seen or heard before.

  The main problem, though, is not eerie sensations but retrieval. Nobody knows exactly how the brain gets what it wants out of storage, but short-term is definitely involved. That brief, sometimes microscopic, time information spends in short-term is apparently used for something besides tip-of-the-tongue availability. The whole complex sort-and-file process of retrieval is apparently centered in short-term, and without it, and without the help of the drugs that put it there or artificial substitutes, information can be impossible to retrieve. I’d used endorphins for examinations and never had any difficulty with retrieval, and it looked like it was the only way to store all the information I needed in anything approaching the time I had left, but it also meant that I would never have known any of the things I needed to know, even for long enough to have forgotten them. If and when I could retrieve the information, I would know it. Till then I was as ignorant of it as if it were not stored in some cobwebbed corner of my mind at all.