How We Play the Game in Salt Lake and Other Stories

by M. Shayne Bell

  And they’ll be back, we figure — they, and others like them. When they come, we hope to show them a few surprises. One will be a planetary defense system. Another will be that we’ll still be here. A third will be plenty of other mammals besides rats with us. The aliens have their insect specimens to work with. We have everything on the whole Earth — with at least two types of persistent life to compare. We’ll find the antidote to DNA melt-down, too. We know now what to look for. We know how little time we have. We know how hard and fast we have to work.

  When I walked into my busted-up condo the day the aliens left Salt Lake, I had an idea what I’d find missing. The TV, the VCR, the microwave, the computer were all still there, if shattered and ripped apart counts as still being there. It was my personal collection of fossils that was gone: my own Meganeura monyi I’d displayed so proudly on a stand on the piano, the Acrididae from their display cases, all the Mastotermitidae. The only thieves I knew who’d take fossilized bugs and leave television sets weren’t from this world.

  Early the next morning, I walked up into the hills to see if any of my gear was worth retrieving. It was. My backpack was thrown off in the scrub oak and still there. My bras were tromped down in the mud, but washable. The tin cooking gear was scattered here and there. I picked it all up.

  Something had been eating the food. From the little tracks, I knew it had been rodents — not rats, I was too high up, but deer mice. What a feast they’d had: lentils, bread, dried hummus, salt. I didn’t begrudge them any of it. I sat there and looked at their tracks and hoped we’d find the antidote in time for them to survive with us.

  The aliens hadn’t found what I’d hidden in the backpack. There’s a pocket inside it, camouflaged at the bottom, a good place for passports and cash. I unzipped it, and what I’d packed into it in my haste that morning was still there: my lovely little section of fossilized termite mound, a hundred million years old, the termite pupae still in their home after all this time. I held them, and sat in the westering sun, and listened to the pleasant buzzing of mosquitoes and flies.

  | Go to Contents |

  BRIGHT, NEW SKIES

  I took my broken goggles to the UV-protective goggles store built into the dike across from the World Trade Center. The wheelhouses of two Siberian cargo ships, docked behind the store to unload wheat, towered above the dike, and I could not stop looking at them because I remembered the days when America exported wheat to my country of Siberia, not the other way around. When Mother could get American wheat, she would bake it into bread early in the morning, and she would laugh at my five brothers and me after the aroma made us tumble out of bed and hurry into the kitchen, rubbing our eyes. “What will this country come to,” she’d say, “if capitalist bread can pull even young communists out of bed?” But that was a long time ago.

  “Lady, either go in the store or get off the sidewalk.”

  Complete stranger. High voice but a man, I guessed — I could not see under his burnoose for physical confirmation. His New Jersey accent told me nothing more than place of origin. I forced myself not to appear startled — not to show any sign of weakness in front of him. The science of biology can teach you that, teach you not to startle, but to observe and record. Biology had startled me many times, but I had flinched only once, not very long ago. I did not flinch in front of this man. I pulled my chador tighter around me and walked toward the store, wary of the man behind me on the sidewalk, listening for any sound that he was moving toward me. I was in a good part of New York City, I kept telling myself. Nothing bad should happen to me here.

  But part of me kept saying that this was New York, not Irkutsk, that I was in a temperate land now, not a polar, and that things were different here. You never knew. The very conference on ozone depletion I had come to speak at had collapsed, and in a world where things like that could happen despite the desperate evidence outside the conference doors, anything at all could happen. Anything.

  Bells jangled when I opened the door. The store was cool. The man did not follow me inside. I closed the door and looked back out at the man as I did so. He was standing there, watching me. Sunlight glinted on goggles under his burnoose. He could have easily walked around me, so I did not know what made him angry enough to order me off the sidewalk. Maybe he belonged to one of the sects that kept women indoors where their skins would never burn and he thought I should not be out like this.

  “Can I help you?” asked a clerk, dim in her chador in shadows behind a counter, Greenwich Village accent.

  I considered asking her to call the police, but I decided to calm myself. The man outside could be merely a religious fanatic, not a pervert, in which case a three-cabbie cab would do as well for me as the police if I needed help leaving this place: one of the expensive cabs, with a driver, a bodyguard riding shotgun in the front passenger seat, and the bodyguard’s rifle that Americans counted as the third cabbie. I realized the man could also be following me, keeping tabs on where I went; the worst that would happen then would be that more company executives would track me down and try to talk to me, try to pay me money for what I had discovered, as if that were what I would want — me, from Siberia, a woman with memories of an old-fashioned, communist mother who would have been ashamed of me for taking it. My discoveries were worth more than money: they were worth the sight in animals’ eyes. I could stop the rush of blindness in all species. But even so, I could not decide whether to announce my discoveries. I would have to change a species forever to save its sight — genetically enhance it; ensure, through adaptation, the final destruction of the world we knew and the creation of a new one. I could not sell such techniques for money. If I decided to use them, I had to give them to a company that would use them well, and quickly, and sell its procedures cheaply. Doing that, at least, would have made my communist mother proud.

  “Can I help you?” the clerk asked again, genuine concern in her voice this time. I let the kindness of her concern wash over me.

  “Yes,” I said, but then I stopped. It was a day for worries, and maybe even shock. On the counter next to the clerk stood a stuffed penguin wearing Xavier-Briggs UV-protective goggles, smiling as if it were as happy on top of a glass case as it would have been on a beach, and all I could do was stare at it. I hadn’t seen a penguin, alive or stuffed, since I’d left Antarctica one year before. “Who did that to a penguin?” I asked. I did not have to add: one of the last penguins.

  “It’s not real. Feel it. It’s fake. Marketing ploy — you’ve seen the TV ads? But the stuffed animals they make these days look so real, don’t they?”

  I nodded and forced myself to look away from the penguin, pulled my broken goggles out of an inside pocket of my chador. That made me remember to throw back the hood, take off my borrowed goggles, and run my fingers through my hair. I was always forgetting to throw back the hood of my chador when I walked in a store, and I wasn’t always in a hurry.

  “Prescription or merely protective?” the clerk asked.

  “Protective. My eyes are still good.”

  “Lucky you. We have to send out for prescription, and that can take an hour. Go ahead and look around at what we have in stock. Try on anything.”

  I walked off down an aisle of goggles, wondering if she’d said “lucky you” because I wouldn’t have to wait or if she meant to comment on the fact that my eyes were still good. I glanced back out the door. The man was still standing on the sidewalk, looking into the store. If he worked for Xavier-Briggs or some other company that had hired him to follow me — and if I could prove it — I’d sue them for harassment. I passed cases of diamond-studded goggles, then rows of fluorescent orange and green goggles. I needed a pair of good work goggles.

  The clerk walked over to me. “Should I call the police about that man outside? Is he a threat to you?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “He ordered me off the street, and that was the first time I heard his voice. I remember voices, so I don’t know him. But he’s just standing there, loo
king at us.”

  “I’m calling the police.”

  She called them on a phone on the wall behind her cash register, then she walked to the front door and locked it. “They’re coming,” she said.

  The man just kept standing on the street, looking into the store.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I did not come here to disrupt your business.”

  “It happens,” she said with a shrug. “But I have your accent now. You’re from Siberia, aren’t you?”

  So she played the game, too. Picking out accents was a game I’d played with expatriate friends I made at Columbia when I was a visiting professor there. We tried to learn what we could about a person from the voice, now that people everywhere hid in clothes for protection against the sun. Voices told more about people than I ever imagined. I could now hear if a man were fat or if a woman were anorexic or if someone were developing skin cancer, all from the voice. My mother claimed to be able to tell what kind of skin cancer people were developing, just from the words they spoke about other things.

  “Yes. I’m Siberian,” I said. “From Irkutsk.”

  “You came for the conference?”

  I nodded.

  “What do you study?”

  “Ecosystems, and how to adapt them to the new world.”

  “Ah, that explains why the penguin upset you. They aren’t adapting, are they?”

  “I will not buy anything made by Xavier-Briggs,” I said, looking back at the begoggled penguin on the counter. All my life I had talked about adapting, with all kinds of people about all kinds of adaptations. I walked down an aisle, looking at the goggles. I saw goggles with little gold crosses on the sides, and I thought of the finely wrought Russian Orthodox church near my mother’s house and how I had talked with her about adaptation there. The communists had made it into a museum, and my mother was proud of that. She used to take me there to see the art on display, art confiscated from private owners after the revolution and now set out for all the people to see. One day we arrived early in the morning. The curator was just opening for the day, and we met him outside on the steps. He was scraping wax off the steps and sweeping up the remains of candles that had burned down in the night. “They make such a mess here,” he said.

  “Who?” I asked, in my little girl’s voice.

  My mother looked sharply at me. “The superstitious in this town who won’t give up trying to worship here,” she said.

  “Why?” I asked. “It’s a museum now. Why do they want to burn candles on the steps?”

  “Because they think this place is holy, whether we call it a museum or not,” the curator said, and he swept the candles into a garbage pail and we all walked inside. I thought and thought about those people, whoever they were, trying to do on the steps what the church had been built for, and thinking about them and their disappointments made me cry. Mother took me outside, and we sat on the steps while I stopped crying. There were still flecks of wax on the steps by my shoes. I reached down to brush them away, into the grass. My mother was not cross with me. “A lot of people cried when we made this place a museum,” she said. “But a new world had come to us back then, and we all had to adapt to it. In the case of the people who valued this place as a church, we had to force the adaptation, for their own good. It’s turned out all right. Forced adaptations might be painful at first, but only at first. In a generation, no one will think of this place as anything but a museum.”

  In spite of those words, I’d gone on to spend my life trying to keep things the way they were, trying to find ways for the natural world to survive as it was without changing it to fit new realities. How I had failed. If I had listened to my mother all those years ago, I would have known that I would fail.

  “Have you seen these?”

  The clerk held up a pair of goggles with tiny aquaria in the temples. Little blue fish swam in them behind tinted glass.

  “We import them from Taiwan,” she said.

  I took them out of her hands. “How do you feed the fish?” I asked.

  “The tops open, here.” She opened one for me, then closed it again. “We sell little boxes of food for the fish, along with the goggles.”

  I tried them on and looked in a mirror. The goggles looked terrible on me, but they were fun. “How much are these?” I asked.

  “Four hundred ninety-seven dollars. Plus tax.”

  I took off the goggles and handed them back. “What I really need is something that can get knocked around in the open,” I said. “Work goggles.”

  “I carry a Swiss line that might be just the thing for you.”

  She led me to a back corner of the store, and I could hear water there, and distant booms from the unloading of one of the Siberian ships. We were evidently standing at the edge of the dike, fifteen feet below the new sea level. I touched the wall. It was cool but not damp.

  The Swiss goggles were fine: black, sturdy frame, scratch-resistant lenses. “I’ll take them,” I said, and someone knocked on the door. We both looked at the door. Three men in suits stood there. Customers, I thought.

  “Meet me at the cash register,” the clerk said, and she hurried to unlock the door.

  I carried my goggles to the cash register and looked at the penguin. I couldn’t help it. It looked so real, and so silly in its goggles. I almost touched it to see if it were fake, after all.

  “You can save that species, can’t you?” the clerk asked me, back now, at the cash register.

  “What do you mean?” I asked. The men in their goggles and burnooses had walked up with her and the man with the Jersey accent was with them, and suddenly I knew. These were all company people. Probably Xavier-Briggs. I did not know what was going to happen. The police were not coming. The clerk had obviously never called them. Her call had brought these men.

  “Why don’t you do something to save the penguins?” the clerk asked me.

  “I would have to destroy them — turn them into something different — to save them,” I said. “I’m not sure it’s worth that.”

  “Gifts of nocturnal eyes and nocturnal biorhythms would save the species from extinction,” one of the men said.

  “No,” I said. “The penguins would still be extinct. I would just have created a new creature on their basic frame.”

  “So you can do it.”

  So I’d been tricked. I was admitting too much of what I could do and what I hesitated to put into practice. I put the goggles on the counter.

  “No, they’re yours.” The clerk pushed them toward me. “We’ll buy you anything you want from here.” She’d kept the Taiwanese goggles with aquaria, and she tried to hand them to me, too. “You at least would take good care of the fish,” she said.

  I would not touch the goggles. I would not be bought with gifts or money.

  “Only the species that can adapt will survive, and not all the ones we need are going to make it,” the clerk said. “We have to help them.”

  And make billions in the process. I’d heard it so many times before, from so many companies. Whoever could finally save the cows alone would make billions. My communist mother, the year after the Soviet Union ceased to exist, when she finally gave up hope of it ever coming back, looked at me and said the only people who would survive now would be the ones who adapted to money-grubbing. “Adapt,” I spat the word out. “You want me to use what I developed to change the natural world so it can adapt to the ugliness and desperation uncontrolled capitalist corporations brought on the earth. And that hasn’t changed, has it? You are all still uncontrolled. All I might do if I work with you is prolong a species’ suffering.”

  “You don’t believe that,” the clerk said. “You were stunned by a stuffed penguin. You came in here to buy goggles to protect your own eyes. If you didn’t want to live in a world that might still include penguins, in whatever form, you wouldn’t be here to take care of yourself.”

  I looked down and said nothing. This clerk could read more than accents. And this was an odd conversa
tion, for me. Yes, they had tried to buy me with gifts of goggles. Yes, that gift implied much more. But they hadn’t yet talked about what more it implied. They had talked mostly about saving species. These people were a little different, after all. “How do I know any of you will let me give eyes to the penguins?” I asked.

  “We have a list of species to save first,” the clerk said. “We could let you add some of those you love most to that list. If we start research and testing on your processes now, perhaps by spring we could have cows in fields again.”

  At night, grazing on the tough grasses inheriting the earth. All the delicate and beautiful soft grasses were gone.

  “Your penguins could be next,” one of the men said.

  “Will you at least talk with us?” another asked. “Xavier-Briggs’ bioengineering division is second to none. We can do this work faster than anyone else. You must want things to move quickly now.”

  “I’ll think about this,” I said.

  “Others will eventually discover what you have,” the clerk said. “You should act now while you have a chance to shape the world in ways you want it shaped.”

  “I’ll need time to think about all this,” I said. “Let me pay for the goggles and go.” I took my credit card from my purse and held it out to the clerk. I knew now that she was no mere clerk, but she had been minding the store, so she had probably been trained to make sales. I was suddenly chilled to think how closely these people had watched me and how accurately they had anticipated my actions and how quickly they had set up this elaborate ruse to talk to me.

  The “clerk” took my card and deducted fifty-nine Siberian dollars for the Swiss goggles from my account. I left the Taiwanese goggles on the counter, put on my new goggles, and walked out of the store. No one offered me a ride; I would not have accepted if they had. None of them asked where they could find me. I was sure they knew how to find me. I walked along, trying to imagine adding the names of six or seven species to a list of a handful to be saved, and wondering how I would choose and whether I should attempt to set up an entire little ecosystem of saved species that could prey on each other in the new world.