Bobby glanced at the list she kept on the wipe-clean plastic board above the stove. Wash pow, toilet pap, marg, lemon juice, wine vinegar. He looked at her face, but it was clear and innocent.
“Aren’t you going to go into the dining room? See what’s waiting?”
“Waiting?”
“Your birthday, Bobby.” She gave him a laugh and a quick, stiff hug. “I asked you what you wanted weeks ago and you never said. So I hope you like it. I’ve kept the receipt—you boys are so difficult.”
“Yeah.” He hadn’t exactly forgotten, he’d simply been pushing the thing back in his mind, the way you do with exams and visits from the doctor, hoping that if you make yourself forget, then the rest of the world will forget, too.
He was seventeen and still a kid. It was at least one birthday too many. He opened the cards first, shaking each envelope carefully to see if there was any money. Some of them had pictures of archaic countryside and inappropriate verses, the sort that grownups gave to each other. One or two people had made the effort to find a child’s card, but there wasn’t much of a market for seventeen year olds. The most enterprising had combined stickons for 1 and 7. Bobby moved to the presents, using his toast knife to slit the tape, trying not to damage any of the wrapping paper, which Mum liked to iron and re-use. Although she hadn’t spoken, he was conscious that she was standing watching at the door. Fighting the sinking feeling of discovering books on subjects that didn’t interest him, accessories for hobbies he didn’t pursue, model cars for a collection he’d given up years ago, he tried to display excitement and surprise.
Mum and Dad’s present was a pair of binoculars, something he’d coveted when he was thirteen for reasons he couldn’t now remember. He gazed at the marmalade jar in close up, through the window at the individual leaves of the nearest cherry tree in the garden.
“We thought you’d find them useful when you grew up too,” Mum said, putting her arms around him.
“It’s great,” he said. In truth, he liked the smell of the case—leather, oil and glass—more than the binoculars themselves. But he knew that wasn’t the point. And then he remembered why he’d so wanted a pair of binoculars, how he’d used to love looking up at the stars.
“Actually, I’ve lots of stuff to get at the supermarket, Bobby. Dad’s taking a half day and we’re going to have a party for you. Everyone’s coming. Isn’t that great?”
Bobby went with Mum to the supermarket. They drove into town past places he and May had visited at night. Even though the sky was clearing to sun, they looked flat and grey. Wandering the supermarket aisles, Mum insisted that Bobby choose whatever he want. He settled at random for iced fancies, pâté, green-veined cheese. Tony came out from his office behind a window of silvered glass, a name badge on his lapel and his hair starting to recede. He clapped Bobby’s shoulder and said he’d never have believed it, seventeen, my own little brother. They chatted awkwardly for a while in the chill drift of the frozen meats. Even though there was a longer line, they chose Marion’s checkout. She was back working at the supermarket part time now that their kid had started nursery school. It wasn’t until Bobby saw her blandly cheerless face that he remembered that night with Tony and the other uncle in the bar. He wondered if she knew, if she cared.
There were cars in the driveway at home and spilling along the cul de sac, little kids with names he couldn’t remember running on the lawn. The weather had turned bright and hot. Dad had fished out all the deckchairs as soon as he got home, the ordinary ones and the specials he kept for uncles. People kept coming up to Bobby and then running out of things to say. He couldn’t remember whether they’d given him cards or presents, what to thank them for. Uncle Lew was in a good mood, the facets of one of the best wine glasses trembling sparks across his rounded face.
“Well, Bobby,” he said, easing himself down in his special deckchair. He was starting to look old, ugly. Too many years, too many happy events. He was nothing like the fresh fat uncle at the motel. “And what are you going to be when you grow up?”
Bobby shrugged. He had grown sick of thinking up lies to please people. The canvas of Lew’s deckchair was wheezing and slightly torn. Bobby hoped that he’d stay a kid long enough to see him fall through.
“Well, get yourself a nice girlfriend,” he said. “It means a lot to me that I’m uncle to your Momma and Poppa and to Tony and Marion too.” He sucked at his wine. “But that’s all up to you.”
Looking back up the lawn toward the house, Bobby saw May and her parents emerging into the sunlight from the open French windows. May looked drab and tired. Her belly was big, her ankles swollen.
She waddled over to them, sweat gleaming on her cheeks.
“Hello, Bobby.” She leaned over to let Uncle Lew give her a hug. He put his lips to her ear. She wriggled and smiled before she pulled away.
“Hello, May.”
She was wearing a cheap print, something that fell in folds like a tent.
“This whole party is a surprise, isn’t it? Your Mum insisted that I didn’t say anything when she told me last week. Here. Happy birthday.”
She gave him a package. He opened it. Five minutes later, he couldn’t remember what it contained.
Dad banged the trestle table and people gathered around on the lawn as he made a speech about how he could hardly believe the way the years had flown, saying the usual things that grownups always said about themselves when it was a child’s birthday. He raised his glass. A toast. Bobby. Everyone intoned his name. Bobby. The sun retreated toward the rooftops and the trees, filling the estate with evening, the weary smell of cooking. Those grownups who hadn’t been able to skip work arrived in their work clothes. Neighbors drifted in.
May came over to Bobby again, her face flushed with the drink and the sun.
“Did the doc come over to see you today?” he asked, for want of anything better. The hilarious intimacy of the things they had done in the night suddenly belonged to a world even more distant than that of the grownups.
“Nothing happened,” she said, spearing a piece of herring on the paper plate she carried with a plastic fork. “Nothing ever happens.” She took a bite of the herring, then pulled a face. “Disgusting. God knows how the grownups enjoy this shit.”
Bobby grinned, recognizing the May he knew. “Let’s go somewhere. No one will notice.”
She shrugged yes and propped her plate on the concrete bird bath. They went through the back gate, squeezed between the bumpers on the driveway, and out along the road.
“Do you still think you’ll never grow up?” Bobby asked.
May shook her head. “What about you?”
“I suppose it’s got to happen. We’re not fooling anyone, are we, going out, not drinking the milk? I’m sure Mum and Dad know. They just don’t seem to care. I mean, we can’t be the first kids in the history of the world to have stumbled on this secret. Well, it can’t be a secret, can it?”
“How about we climb up to the meadows?” May said. “The town looks good from up there.”
“Have you ever read Peter Pan?” Bobby asked as they walked up the dirt road between the allotments and the saw mill. “He never grew up. Lived in a wonderful land and learned how to fly.” He held open the kissing gate that led into the fields. May had to squeeze through. The grass was high and slivered with seed, whispering under a deepening sky. “When I was young,” he said, “on evenings like this, I used to look out of my bedroom window and watch the grownups. I thought that they could fly.”
“Who do you think can fly now?”
“No one. We’re all the same.”
They stopped to catch their breath and look down at the haze below. Hills, trees, and houses, the wind carrying the chime of an ice-cream van, the river stealing silver from the sky. He felt pain spread through him, then dissolve without finding focus.
May took his hand. “Remember when we came up here alone that time, years ago?” She drew it toward her breast, then down. “You touched me here,
and here. We had sex. You’d never done it before.” She let his hand fall. Bobby felt no interest. May no longer smelled of rain, and he was relieved that he didn’t have to turn her down.
The pain came again, more strongly this time. He swayed. The shimmering air cleared, and for one moment there was a barge on the river, a tractor slicing a field from green to brown, a hawk circling high overhead, May smiling, sweet and young, as she said Let’s Do It, Bobby, pulling her dress up over her head. He blinked.
“Are you okay?”
“I’m fine,” he said, leaning briefly against her, feeling the thickness of her arms.
“I think we’d better go back.”
Down the hill, the pain began to localize. First circling in his spine, then gradually shifting orbit toward his belly. It came and went. When it was there, it was so unbelievable that he put it aside in the moments of recession. Had to be a bad dream. The trees swayed with the rush of twilight, pulling him forward, drawing him back.
Progress was slow. Night came somewhere along the way. Helped by May, he staggered from lamppost to lamppost, dreading the darkness between. People stared, or asked if everything was okay before hurrying on. He tasted rust in his mouth. He spat on the pavement, wiped his hand. It came away black.
“Nearly there,” May said, half-holding him around his searing belly.
He looked up and saw houses he recognized, the mailbox that was the nearest one to home. His belly was crawling. He remembered how that mailbox had been a marker of his suffering one day years before when he’d been desperate to get home and pee, and, another time, walking back from school when his shoes were new and tight. Then the pain rocked him, blocking his sight. True pain, hard as flint, soft as drowning. He tried to laugh. That made it worse and better. Bobby knew that this was just the start, an early phase of the contractions.
He couldn’t remember how they reached home. There were hands and voices, furious dialings of the phone. Bobby couldn’t get upstairs and didn’t want to mess up the settee by lying on it. But the grownups insisted, pushed him down, and then someone found a plastic sheet and tucked it under him in between the worst of the waves. He thrashed around, seeing the TV, the mantelpiece, the fibers of the carpet, the light burning at his eyes. I’m not here, he told himself, this isn’t real. Then the biggest, darkest wave yet began to reach him.
Wings of pain settled over him. For a moment without time, Bobby dreamed that he was flying.
* * *
Bobby awoke in a chilly white room. There was a door, dim figures moving beyond the frosted glass. He was still floating, hardly conscious of his own body. The whiteness of the room hurt his eyes. He closed them, opened them again. Now it was night. Yellow light spilled through the glass. The figures moving beyond had globular heads, no necks, tapering bodies.
One of the figures paused. The door opened. The silence cracked like a broken seal. He could suddenly hear voices, the clatter of trolleys. He was conscious of the hard flatness of the bed against his back, coils of tubing descending into his arm from steel racks. His throat hurt. His mouth tasted faintly of liquorice. The air smelled the way the bathroom cabinet did at home. Of soap and aspirins.
“Your eyes are open. Bobby, can you see?”
The shape at the door blocked the light. It was hard to make it out. Then it stepped forward, and he saw the soft curve of May’s cheek, the glimmer of her eye.
“Can you speak?”
“No,” he said.
May turned on a light over the bed and sat down with a heavy sigh. He tried to track her by moving his eyes, but after the brief glimpse of her face, all he could see was the dimpled curve of her elbow.
“This is the hospital?”
“Yes. You’ve grown up.”
The hospital. Growing up. They must have taken him here from home. Which meant that it had been a difficult change.
May said, “You’re lucky to be alive.”
Alive. Yes. Alive. He waited for a rush of some feeling or other—relief, gratitude, achievement, pride. There was nothing, just this white room, the fact of his existence.
“What happens now?” he asked.
“Your parents will want to see you.”
“Where are they?”
“At home. It’s been days, Bobby.”
“Then why…” the taste of liquorice went gritty in his mouth. He swallowed it back. “Why are you here, May?”
“I’m having tests, Bobby. I just thought I’d look in.”
“Thanks.”
“There’s no need to thank me. I won’t forget the times we had.”
Times. We. Had. Bobby put the words together, then let them fall apart.
“Yes,” he said.
“Well.” May stood up.
Now he could see her. Her hair was cut short, sitting oddly where her fat cheeks met her ears. Her breasts hung loose inside a T-shirt. Along with everything else about her, they seemed to have grown, but the nipples had gone flat and she’d given up wearing a bra. She shrugged and spread her arms. He caught a waft of her scent: she needed a wash. It was sickly but somehow appealing, like the old cheese that you found at the back of the fridge and needed to eat right away.
“Sometimes it happens,” she said.
“Yes,” Bobby said. “The bitter milk.”
“No one knows really, do they? Life’s a mystery.”
Is it? Bobby couldn’t be bothered to argue.
“Will you change your name?” he asked. “Move to another town?”
“Maybe. It’s a slow process. I’m really not an uncle yet, you know.”
Still a child. Bobby gazed at her uncomfortably, trying to see it in her eyes, finding with relief that the child wasn’t there.
“What’s it like?” May asked.
“What?”
“Being a grownup.”
“Does anyone ask a child what it’s like to be a child?”
“I suppose not.”
His head ached, his voice was fading. He blinked slowly. He didn’t want to say more. What else was there to say? He remembered waiting stupidly as his brother Tony sat up in bed watching TV that first morning after he’d grown up. Waiting as though there was an answer. But growing up was just part of the process of living, which he realized now was mostly about dying.
May reached out to touch his face. The fingers lingered for a moment, bringing a strange warmth. Their odor was incredibly strong to Bobby. But it was sweet now, like the waft from the open door of a bakery. It hit the back of his palate and then ricocheted down his spine. He wondered vaguely if he was going to get an erection and killed the thought as best he could; he hated the idea of appearing vulnerable to May. After all, she was still half a child.
“You’d better be going,” he said.
May backed away. “You’re right.” She reached for the handle of the door, clumsily, without looking.
“Goodbye, May,” Bobby said.
She stood for a moment in the open doorway. For a moment, the light fell kindly on her face and she was beautiful. Then she stepped back and all her youth was gone.
“Goodbye, Bobby,” she said, and glanced down at her wristwatch. “I’ve got things to do. I really must fly.”
GRAVES
Joe Haldeman
Shakespeare said it best, as usual: “To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub…” as amply demonstrated by the chilling story that follows.
Born in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, Joe Haldeman received a B.S. in physics and astronomy from the University of Maryland, and did postgraduate work in mathematics and computer science. But his plans for a career in science were cut short by the U.S. Army, which sent him to Vietnam in 1968 as a combat engineer. Seriously wounded in action, Haldeman returned home in 1969 and began to write. He sold his first story to Galaxy in 1969, and by 1976 had garnered both the Nebula Award and the Hugo Award for his famous novel The Forever War, one of the landmark books of the ’70s. He took another Hugo Award in 1977 for his story “Tricen
tennial,” won the Rhysling Award in 1983 for the best science-fiction poem of the year (although usually thought of primarily as a “hard-science” writer, Haldeman is, in fact, also an accomplished poet, and has sold poetry to most of the major professional markets in the genre), and won both the Nebula and the Hugo Award in 1991 for the novella version of “The Hemingway Hoax.” His other books include a mainstream novel, War Year, the SF novels Mindbridge, All My Sins Remembered, There Is No Darkness (written with his brother, SF writer Jack C. Haldeman II), Worlds, Worlds Apart, Buying Time, and The Hemingway Hoax, the “techno-thriller” Tool of the Trade, the collections Infinite Dreams and Dealing in Futures, and, as editor, the anthologies Study War No More, Cosmic Laughter, and Nebula Award Stories Seventeen. His most recent book is the SF novel Worlds Enough and Time, and upcoming is a major new mainstream novel, 1969. He has had stories in our First, Third, and Eighth Annual Collections. Haldeman lives part of the year in Boston, where he teaches writing at M.I.T., and the rest of the year in Florida, where he and his wife, Gay, make their home.
I have this persistent sleep disorder that makes life difficult for me, but still I want to keep it. Boy, do I want to keep it. It goes back twenty years, to Vietnam. To Graves.
Dead bodies turn from bad to worse real fast in the jungle. You’ve got a few hours before rigor mortis makes them hard to handle, hard to stuff in a bag. By that time, they start to turn greenish, if they started out white or yellow, where you can see the skin. It’s mostly bugs by then, usually ants. Then they go to black and start to smell.
They swell up and burst.
You’d think the ants and roaches and beetles and millipedes would make short work of them after that, but they don’t. Just when they get to looking and smelling the worst, the bugs sort of lose interest, get fastidious, send out for pizza. Except for the flies. Laying eggs.
The funny thing is, unless some big animal got to it and tore it up, even after a week or so, you’ve still got something more than a skeleton, even a sort of a face. No eyes, though. Every now and then, we’d get one like that. Not too often, since soldiers usually don’t die alone and sit there for that long, but sometimes. We called them “dry ones.” Still damp underneath, of course, and inside, but kind of like a sunburned mummy otherwise.
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