by IGMS
Lying beneath me . . . was my body. My body!
It didn't move. If it had, I would have been stunned, because the hollow-point bullet had blown away a massive chunk of skull and brains. There was no chance I had survived that.
Which meant I was dead -- and still experiencing the gunshot. I was frozen in that split second where the hollow-point tore through the roof of my mouth, mushroomed out, and then shredded my brain before blowing open the back of my skull.
And suddenly I knew I would feel this way forever. I had no idea how or why, but I knew. Whether it was punishment from God or simply a unknown fact of the afterlife made no difference. I was trapped in this moment of Promethean pain for all time.
They say people can get used to anything. Apparently this applies in the afterlife, too, because a week later I was in no less pain than before, but I had grown accustomed enough to it that I was able to think and move with a little more ease.
All those schmucks who had heart attacks while getting laid. They had no idea how lucky they were. I pondered that fact angrily. Of course, I did everything angrily. The pain kept me in an eternally sour mood.
And as if the pain weren't enough to maintain my foul demeanor, when I first began to move around, I quickly learned that I was not only trapped in the moment of my death, I was also trapped in the room where I had shot myself. I could open and close the library door, pull books off the shelves, even stumble over my own rank-smelling corpse. But leave the room? Never.
I grew angrier with each passing moment.
And speaking of rank smelling, where the hell was Trish? An entire week and she hadn't come home yet.
For that matter, where was the staff? The maid? Butler? Cook? They were all gone. I was glad enough they were out of the house the day I shot myself; I really didn't want to be interrupted. But someone should have come home by now. Especially that wretched wife of mine. The thought of her seeing what I had done to her Monet -- and I had made a royal mess of it, more than I ever could have hoped for -- that was all that kept me going. So where was that witch of a . . .
"Honey?"
Trish! I hadn't heard her come in, but that was her voice. No doubt about it.
I made sure the door to the library was open and sat down in an over-stuffed chair to watch the show.
Briefly I wondered if she would be able to see me sitting there. That would certainly present some interesting possibilities. I hadn't considered it before, but being trapped here like this . . . well, as long as she stuck around, I could haunt her to my heart's content. I was a poltergeist. An angry, noisy ghost with a foul disposition -- one that I would be more than happy to inflict on her for as long as possible. That had the potential for some real fun.
"Honey?" I heard her call again. "Margot and I jetted down to the Bahamas for the week. Since you'd be all by yourself I didn't think you'd need any help, so I took the staff with me. That didn't cause you any problems, did it? I surely hope not."
After all these years, that was the best she could come up with? Take the staff away to inconvenience me? She was losing her touch.
"By the way," she began . . .
Ah. Here comes the big one. I should have known better; taking the staff had just been foreplay.
"I got tested about three months ago and I have AIDS. You should have contracted it by now, too."
Wow. So smooth; so matter-of-fact. So calculated. Based on her delivery, I couldn't help but think that she had intentionally sought out a way to get AIDS just to infect me.
It also explained a lot: why she had suddenly grown amorous again, as well as those new medications she had recently started taking. She had hidden them well enough that I couldn't find them, but I knew she had been taking a new drug cocktail.
If I hadn't been dead, that would have really gotten to me. That would have infuriated me.
But I was dead. Beyond her. If my head hadn't hurt so much, I would have laughed. To tell you the truth, though, I hurt too much to ever laugh again.
I heard Trish call out again; obviously she was expecting some sort of reaction. "Sweetie pie," she called, "did you hear what I said?"
I grabbed a paperweight off my desk and threw it against the wall, hoping to attract her attention. It whumped twice, once against the wall and once more when it hit the floor.
"Sweetheart?"
Her voice was getting closer. Finally, an advantage to being a poltergeist. I threw a book.
"Are you in here, pudding?"
She came through the door . . .
And froze.
Oh, it was beautiful. She spotted my body with her eyes at the exact same moment that the smell hit her nose. She wears so much perfume that there was no way she could have picked up the stench until she was right on top of me, and it was perfect. I couldn't have planned it any better.
Stunned, she brought her hand to her mouth, just like I had anticipated. But she just stared at my body. She couldn't take her eyes off of it.
I wanted to shout, but I knew she wouldn't hear me even if I tried. But wanted to. Oh how I wanted to. The painting, damn you! Look at the painting!
I contemplated throwing a pen or something in the direction of her precious Monet; she took two steps toward the spot where my body rested.
"Nooooo!!" she wailed.
I was stunned. After all these years, was she actually distraught over losing me?
Snatching up my pistol, she fired three quick shots into my fetid corpse.
Okay - now things were getting interesting.
"How did you find out?" she screamed. "How did you find out I gave you AIDS?"
This time she kicked my body in the small of the back.
"How did you find out?" She screamed again, bending closer to my body as if I could hear her better that way.
Straightening up, she looked around the room - but she never saw the stupid painting. The look in her eyes was one of someone gazing off into infinity. Then she started shaking her head.
"Oh no," she said. Very softly. "You're not leaving me here to deal with this infernal disease all by myself. You don't get to do that to me. I decide when this is over; not you."
She brought the gun to her head, lowered it for just a second, then brought it back to her head again. I saw her fingers stiffen with resolve as she said again, "I decide, not you."
And just like that, the ramifications of what she was about to do hit me like a Learjet.
Nooooo, I wanted to scream. Noooo!
Damn it, no! No! Kill yourself if you want, I don't care. But not in here. Please, God, not in here! I'm not spending eternity trapped in this room with --
Ka-blam.
This time I heard the gun shot.
It was much louder than I expected . . .
America
by Orson Scott Card
Artwork by Scott Altmann
* * *
Sam Monson and Anamari Boagente had two encounters in their lives, forty years apart. The first encounter lasted for several weeks in the high Amazon jungle, the village of Agualinda. The second was for only an hour near the ruins of the Glen Canyon Dam, on the border between Navaho country and the State of Deseret.
When they met the first time, Sam was a scrawny teenager from Utah and Anamari was a middle-aged spinster Indian from Brazil. When they met the second time, he was governor of Deseret, the last European state in America, and she was, to some people's way of thinking, the mother of God. It never occurred to anyone that they had ever met before, except me. I saw it plain as day, and pestered Sam until he told me the whole story. Now Sam is dead, and she's long gone, and I'm the only one who knows the truth. I thought for a long time that I'd take this story untold to my grave, but I see now that I can't do that. The way I see it, I won't be allowed to die until I write this down. All my real work was done long since, so why else am I alive? I figure the land has kept me breathing so I can tell the story of its victory, and it has kept you alive so you can hear it. Gods are like that. It isn't enough for them to r
un everything. They want to be famous, too.
AGUALINDA, AMAZONAS
Passengers were nothing to her. Anamari only cared about helicopters when they brought medical supplies. This chopper carried a precious packet of benaxidene; Anamari barely noticed the skinny, awkward boy who sat by the crates, looking hostile. Another Yanqui who doesn't want to be stuck out in the jungle. Nothing new about that. Norteamericanos were almost invisible to Anamari by now. They came and went.
It was the Brazilian government people she had to worry about, the petty bureaucrats suffering through years of virtual exile in Manaus, working out their frustrations by being petty tyrants over the helpless Indians. No I'm sorry we don't have any more penicillin, no more syringes, what did you do with the AIDS vaccine we gave you three years ago? Do you think we're made of money here? Let them come to town if they want to get well. There's a hospital in São Paulo de Olivenca, send them there, we're not going to turn you into a second hospital out there in the middle of nowhere, not for a village of a hundred filthy Baniwas, it's not as if you're a doctor, you're just an old withered-up Indian woman yourself, you never graduated from the medical schools, we can't spare medicines for you. It made them feel so important, to decide whether or not an Indian child would live or die. As often as not they passed sentence of death by refusing to send supplies. It made them feel powerful as God.
Anamari knew better than to protest or argue -- it would only make that bureaucrat likelier to kill again in the future. But sometimes, when the need was great and the medicine was common, Anamari would go to the Yanqui geologists and ask if they had this or that. Sometimes they did. What she knew about Yanquis was that if they had some extra, they would share, but if they didn't, they wouldn't lift a finger to get any. They were not tyrants like Brazilian bureaucrats. They just didn't give a damn. They were there to make money.
That was what Anamari saw when she looked at the sullen light-haired boy in the helicopter -- another Norteamericano, just like all the other Norteamericanos, only younger.
She had the benaxidene, and so she immediately began spreading word that all the Baniwas should come for injections. It was a disease introduced during the war between Guyana and Venezuela two years ago; as usual, most of the victims were not citizens of either country, just the Indios of the jungle, waking up one morning with their joints stiffening, hardening until no movement was possible. Benaxidene was the antidote, but you had to have it every few months or your joints would stiffen up again. As usual, the bureaucrats had diverted a shipment and there were a dozen Baniwas bedridden in the village. As usual, one or two of the Indians would be too far gone for the cure; one or two of their joints would be stiff for the rest of their lives. As usual, Anamari said little as she gave the injections, and the Baniwas said less to her.
It was not until the next day that Anamari had time to notice the young Yanqui boy wandering around the village. He was wearing rumpled white clothing, already somewhat soiled with the greens and browns of life along the rivers of the Amazon jungle. He showed no sign of being interested in anything, but an hour into her rounds, checking on the results of yesterday's benaxidene treatments, she became aware that he was following her.
She turned around in the doorway of the government-built hovel and faced him. "O que?" she demanded. What do you want?
To her surprise, he answered in halting Portuguese. Most of these Yanquis never bothered to learn the language at all, expecting her and everybody else to speak English. "Posso adujar?" he asked. Can I help?
"Nao," she said. "Mas pode olhar." You can watch.
He looked at her in bafflement.
She repeated her sentence slowly, enunciating clearly. "Pode olhar."
"Eu?" Me?
"Voce, sim. And I can speak English."
"I don't want to speak English."
"Tanto faz," she said. Makes no difference.
He followed her into the hut. It was a little girl, lying naked in her own feces. She had palsy from a bout with meningitis years ago, when she was an infant, and Anamari figured that the girl would probably be one of the ones for whom the benaxidene came too late. That's how things usually worked -- the weak suffer most. But no, her joints were flexing again, and the girl smiled at them, that heartbreakingly happy smile that made palsy victims so beautiful at times.
So. Some luck after all, the benaxidene had been in time for her. Anamari took the lid off the clay waterjar that stood on the one table in the room, and dipped one of her clean rags in it. She used it to wipe the girl, then lifted her frail, atrophied body and pulled the soiled sheet out from under her. On impulse, she handed the sheet to the boy.
"Leva fora," she said. And, when he didn't understand, "Take it outside."
He did not hesitate to take it, which surprised her. "Do you want me to wash it?"
"You could shake off the worst of it," she said. "Out over the garden in back. I'll wash it later."
He came back in, carrying the wadded-up sheet, just as she was leaving. "All done here," she said. "We'll stop by my house to start that soaking. I'll carry it now."
He didn't hand it to her. "I've got it," he said. "Aren't you going to give her a clean sheet?"
"There are only four sheets in the village," she said. "Two of them are in my bed. She won't mind lying on the mat. I'm the only one in the village who cares about linens. I'm also the only one who cares about this girl."
"She likes you," he said.
"She smiles like that at everybody."
"So maybe she likes everybody."
Anamari grunted and led the way to her house. It was two government hovels pushed together. The one served as her clinic, the other as her home. Out back she had two metal washtubs. She handed one of them to the Yanqui boy, pointed at the rainwater tank, and told him to fill it. He did. It made her furious.
"What do you want!" she demanded.
"Nothing," he said.
"Why do you keep hanging around?"
"I thought I was helping." His voice was full of injured pride.
"I don't need your help." She forgot that she had meant to leave the sheet to soak. She began rubbing it on the washboard.
"Then why did you ask me to . . ."
She did not answer him, and he did not complete the question.
After a long time he said, "You were trying to get rid of me, weren't you?"
"What do you want here?" she said. "Don't I have enough to do, without a Norteamericano boy to look after?"
Anger flashed in his eyes, but he did not answer until the anger was gone. "If you're tired of scrubbing, I can take over."
She reached out and took his hand, examined it for a moment. "Soft hands," she said. "Lady hands. You'd scrape your knuckles on the washboard and bleed all over the sheet."
Ashamed, he put his hands in his pockets. A parrot flew past him, dazzling green and red; he turned in surprise to look at it. It landed on the rainwater tank. "Those sell for a thousand dollars in the States," he said.
Of course the Yanqui boy evaluates everything by price. "Here they're free," she said. "The Baniwa eat them. And wear the feathers."
He looked around at the other huts, the scraggly gardens. "The people are very poor here," he said. "The jungle life must be hard."
"Do you think so?" she snapped. "The jungle is very kind to these people. It has plenty for them to eat, all year. The Indians of the Amazon did not know they were poor until Europeans came and made them buy pants, which they couldn't afford, and build houses, which they couldn't keep up, and plant gardens. Plant gardens! In the midst of this magnificent Eden. The jungle life was good. The Europeans made them poor."
"Europeans?" asked the boy.
"Brazilians. They're all Europeans. Even the black ones have turned European. Brazil is just another European country, speaking a European language. Just like you Norteamericanos. You're Europeans too."
"I was born in America," he said. "So were my parents and grandparents and great-grandparents."
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"But your bis-bis-avos, they came on a boat."
"That was a long time ago," he said.
"A long time!" She laughed. "I am a pure Indian. For ten thousand generations I belong to this land. You are a stranger here. A fourth-generation stranger."
"But I'm a stranger who isn't afraid to touch a dirty sheet," he said. He was grinning defiantly.
That was when she started to like him. "How old are you?" she asked.
"Fifteen," he said.
"Your father's a geologist?"
"No. He heads up the drilling team. They're going to sink a test well here. He doesn't think they'll find anything, though."
"They will find plenty of oil," she said.
"How do you know?"
"Because I dreamed it," she said. "Bulldozers cutting down the trees, making the airstrip, and planes coming and going. They'd never do that, unless they found oil. Lots of oil."
She waited for him to make fun of the idea of dreaming true dreams. But he didn't. He just looked at her.
So she was the one who broke the silence. "You came to this village to kill time while your father is away from you, on the job, right?"
"No," he said. "I came here because he hasn't started to work yet. The choppers start bringing in equipment tomorrow."
"You would rather be away from your father?"
He looked away. "I'd rather see him in hell."
"This is hell," she said, and the boy laughed. "Why did you come here with him?"
"Because I'm only fifteen years old, and he has custody of me this summer."
"Custody," she said. "Like a criminal."
"He's the criminal," he said bitterly.
"And his crime?"
He waited a moment, as if deciding whether to answer. When he spoke, he spoke quietly and looked away. Ashamed. Of his father's crime. "Adultery," he said. The word hung in the air. The boy turned back and looked her in the face again. His face was tinged with red.
Europeans have such transparent skin, she thought. All their emotions show through. She guessed a whole story from his word -- a beloved mother betrayed, and now he had to spend the summer with her betrayer. "Is that a crime?"