Year’s Best SF 16

by Hartwell, David G. ; Cramer, Kathryn

  The judge advocate: Are you objecting to that question, the last question about somnambulism?

  Counsel for the accused (Mr. Littleton): Yes, the last question is the only one I could object to. The others were all answered. I am objecting to it on the basis that it is irrelevant.

  By a member: Mr. President, I also would like to arise to ask the point of these questions, so that we may know, at the time they are asked, whether they are relevant or not.

  Counsel assisting the judge advocate: If the court please, we would be very ready and willing to tell you what our purpose is, but it would disclose the purpose of the cross examination, and I don’t think we are required to state before the court and before the witness what our purpose may be in bringing out this subject of somnambulism. But it is perfectly proper cross examination, inasmuch as the witness has testified to sleeping soundly at the time of these alleged incidents.

  The accused: I am perfectly willing to answer the question.

  Counsel assisting the judge advocate: The witness and the judge advocate are at one on that now, if the judge advocate will ask that question.

  The court was cleared.

  The court was opened. All parties to the trial entered, and the president announced that the court overruled the objection.

  481. Q. Very well, Captain Claiborne. Have you ever suffered from somnambulism?

  Counsel for the accused (Mr. Littleton): I object—

  The judge advocate: Let me rephrase the question. Did you experience an episode of somnambulism while on board the U.S.S. Cincinnati, between the first and twenty-seventh of November of last year?

  A. I can’t remember exactly what day. But I had a sensation of being awake and dreaming at the same time. This is not unusual with me, and from time to time I have had this experience ever since I was a boy. This is only the most extreme example, and I imagine that I was affected by a sort of nervous excitement, due to the end of the hostilities in Europe, and of course my own catastrophic reversal of fortune. This was in the very early morning when I saw myself at the top of a great cliff, while below me I could see the streets of a town laid out with lines of lamp-posts, glowing in a sort of a fog. I thought to myself that I was overlooking a town or city of the dead. There were houses full of dead men, and hospitals full of soldiers of every nationality, and also influenza patients who were laid outside in an open field or empty lot. I thought there were thousands of them. At the same time there was a long, straight boulevard cutting through the town from north to south. I saw a regiment or a battalion march along it toward a dark beach along the sea, which had a yellow mist and a yellow froth on the water. Other men climbed toward me up a narrow ravine. I thought to myself that I must fight them to protect the high plain, and I had a stick in my hand to do it. As they clambered up I struck at them one by one. The first fellow over the ledge was Captain Harrington, whom I replaced on board the Cincinnati, because he had died of the influenza in October—the bloom was on his face. It was a fight, but I struck and struck until the stick burst in my hand. Then I woke up and found myself outside on the balcony, long past midnight—

  482. Q. By balcony I presume you mean the ship’s rail—

  A. No, no, I mean the balcony of my hotel where I was staying with my wife. I mean I had left the bed and climbed out onto the balcony, dressed only in my shirt. It was four A.M., judging from my wrist-watch. This was in New York City before Christmas, less than a month ago, several weeks after I had been detached from the ship.

  Counsel assisting the judge advocate: Captain Claiborne, please restrict your answers to the time covered in the complaint, prior to the twenty-seventh of November.

  Counsel for the accused (Mr. Littleton): Again I must object to this entire line of questioning, on the grounds that it is irrelevant.

  The judge advocate: I withdraw the question—

  The president: The objection is overruled. The court would like the witness to continue.

  The member: This was during the third week in Advent, was it not? During what is commonly called the “Ember Days”?

  The president: The stick that was in your hand, the court would like to know what type of stick it was.

  The member: Captain Claiborne, will you tell the court whether you were born still wrapped inside an afterbirth membrane, which is a trait or condition that can run in certain families—

  The judge advocate: Mr. President, I must agree with my esteemed colleague, the counsel for the accused—

  The president: The objection is overruled. The witness will answer the question. Now, Captain Claiborne, the court would like to know if you experienced any stiffness or muscular discomfort prior to this event, especially in your neck or jaw.

  A. Well, now that you mention it, I did have a discomfort of that kind.

  The president: The court would like you to expand on your answer to an earlier question, when you described your encounter with Captain Harrington. You said the bloom was on his face, or words of that effect. Did you see any marks or symptoms of the influenza epidemic on him at that time?

  Counsel for the accused (Mr. Littleton): I object—

  The judge advocate: Mr. President—

  The president: The objection is overruled. The witness will answer the question.

  A. Now that you mention it, there is a great deal more I could say about the events of that night, between the time I recognized Captain Harrington and the time I came to myself on the balcony above Lexington Avenue. If the court wishes, I could proceed. Captain Harrington was the first but by no means the last who were climbing up along the precipice, and all of them bore traces of the epidemic. Pale skin, dull eyes, hair lank and wet. Hectic blossoms on their cheeks, and in this way they were different than the soldiers marching below them in the streets of the necropolis, most of whom, I see now, were returning from France. I remember Captain Harrington because I was able to dislodge his fingers and thrust him backward with a broken head. But soon I was forced to retreat, because these ones who had climbed the cliffs and spread out along the plain were too numerous for us to resist. I had no more than a company of raw recruits under my command. Against us marched several hundred of the enemy, perhaps as many as a battalion of all qualities and conditions, while behind them I could see a large number of women in their hospital gowns. Severely outnumbered, we gave way before them. But I brought us to the high ground, where we attempted to defend a single house on a high hill, a mansion in the French style. The weather had been calm, but then I heard a roll of distant thunder. A stroke of lightning split the sky, followed by a pelting rain, and a wind strong enough to flatten the wide, flat stalks as the fire burned. By then it was black night, and whether from some stroke of lightning or some other cause, but the roof of the house had caught on fire. By its light I could see the battle in the corn, while at the same time we were reinforced quite unexpectedly in a way that is difficult for me to describe. But a ship had come down from the clouds, a great metal airship or dirigible, while a metal stair unrolled out of its belly . . .

  9. Ember Days

  My grandfather was immediately acquitted of all charges. The president of the court, and at least one of its members, came down to shake his hand. Nevertheless, he did not linger in the Marine Corps, but put in for his release as quickly as he could. In some ways he was not suited to a soldier’s life. You can’t please everyone: There were some—among them his brother-in-law, Howard Harrington—who thought his acquittal had not fully restored his reputation.

  Subsequently he ran a music school in Rye, New York, hosted a classical music radio program in New York City, and even wrote a book, before he left the United States to practice law in the Caribbean. Prior to his disbarment he was full of schemes—expensive kumquat jellies, Nubian goats delivered to the mainland by submarine during the Second World War—all of which my grandmother dutifully underwrote. His farm in Maricao was called the Hacienda Santa Rita, and it was there that we visited him when I was nine years old, my father,
my two older sisters, and myself. My mother hadn’t seen him since she was a teenager, and did not accompany us. She could never forgive the way he’d treated her and her brother when they were children. This was something I didn’t appreciate at the time, particularly since he went out of his way to charm us. He organized a parade in our honor, roasted a suckling pig. And he showed an interest in talking to me—the first adult ever to do so—perhaps from some mistaken idea of primogeniture. In those days he was a slender, elegant, white-haired old man.

  Later I was worried that my own life would follow his trajectory of false starts and betrayals and dependency. Early on he had staked out the position that ordinary standards of civilized behavior had no hold on people like him. On the contrary, the world owed him a debt because of his genius, which had been thwarted and traduced at every turn—a conspiracy of jealous little minds. It was this aspect of her father’s personality that my mother hated most of all, and regularly exposed to ridicule. A moderately gifted musician, he had the pretensions of genius, she used to say, without the talent. Moreover, she said, even if he’d been Franz Liszt himself, he could not have justified the damage that he caused. When I asked why her mother had stayed with him, she retorted that you don’t turn a sick dog out to die. But I suspected there was more to her parents’ marriage than that, and more to his sense of privilege. Laying the record of his court-martial aside, I imagined that any summary of his life that did not include the valiant battle he had waged—one of many, I guessed—against the victims of the Spanish Influenza epidemic of 1918, would seem truncated and absurd. Maybe the goats and the kumquats were the visible, sparse symptoms of a secret and urgent campaign, the part of the ice above the water.

  When my mother talked about her father, I always thought she was advising me, because it was obvious from photographs that I took after him. She had no patience for anything old, either from her or my father’s family, and she was constantly throwing things away. My father’s father never forgave her for disposing of the caul I was born in, and she never forgave him for pressing on me, when I was seven, a bizarre compensation for this supposed loss. He had wrapped it up for me, or Winifred had: a sequined and threadbare velvet pouch, which contained, in a rubberized inner compartment, his cousin Theo’s caul, her prized possession, which she had carried with her at all times. She had embroidered her name in thick gold thread; furious, my mother snatched up the pouch and hid it away. I only rediscovered it years later, when she asked me to move some boxes in the attic.

  When I was a child I kept the thought of this velvet pouch as a picture in my mind, and referred to it mentally whenever I heard a story about something large contained in something small, as often happens in fairy tales. I had seen it briefly, when my grandfather had first pressed it into my hands. It was about six inches long, red velvet worn away along the seams. Some of the stitches on the “T” and the “h” had come undone.

  But I wondered when I was young, was I special in any way? Perhaps it was my specialness that could explain my failures, then and always. At a certain moment, we cannot but hope, the ordinary markers of success will show themselves to be fraudulent, irrelevant, diversionary. All those cheating hucksters, those athletes and lovers, those trusted businessmen and competent professionals, those good fathers, good husbands, and good providers will hang their heads in shame while the rest of us stand forward, unapologetic at long last.

  Thinking these inspirational thoughts, in the third week of September—the third sequence of ember days of the liturgical year, as I had learned from various wikipedias—I drove up to the Park-McCullough House again. As usual that summer and fall, I had not been able to fall asleep in my own bed. Past two o’clock in the morning, Theodora Park’s velvet purse in my pocket, I sidled up to each of the mansion’s doors in turn, and tried the second key I had found among the roots of the willow. Some windows on the upper floor were broken. Ghosts, I thought, were wandering through the building and the grounds, but I couldn’t get the key to work. Defeated, I stepped back from the porte-cochere; it was a warm night. Bugs blundered in the beam of my flashlight. The trees had grown up over the years, and it was too much to expect that a ship or dirigible would find the space to land here safely. The same could be said of Bartlett Hill in Preston, which I had visited many years before. Logged and cleared during Colonial times, now it was covered with second- or third-growth forest. From the crest overlooking the Avery-Parke Cemetery, you could barely see the lights and spires of Foxwoods Casino, rising like the Emerald City only a few miles away. I found myself wondering if the casino was still there, and if the “ruind hutts of the Pecuods” had “burst afire” as a result of the ship coming down, or as some kind of signal to indicate a landing site. Whichever, it was certainly interesting that in Robert Claiborne’s account of the battle on the French-style mansion’s lawn, “the roof of the house had caught on fire.”

  Interesting, but not conclusive. As a scholar, I was trained to discount these seductive similarities. I had not yet dared to unbutton the velvet pouch or slip my hand inside, but with my hand firmly in my pocket I stepped back through the broken, padlocked, wrought-iron fence and stumbled back to the main road, where I had left my car. And because, like three-quarters of the faculty at Williams College, I was on unpaid leave for the fall semester, I thought I would drive down to Richmond and see Adrian, who was now thirty years old—a milestone. That was at least my intention. I had a reliable automobile, one of the final hydrogen-cell, solar-panel hybrids before Toyota discontinued exports. I would take Route 2 to 87, making a wide semicircle around the entire New York City area, before rejoining 95 in central New Jersey. I would drive all night. There’d be no traffic to speak of, except the lines of heavy trucks at all the checkpoints.

  So let’s just say I went that way. Let’s just say it was possible to go. And let’s just say that nothing happened on that long, dark drive, until morning had come.

  Beyond the Delaware Bridge I saw the army convoys headed south along I-95. North of Baltimore it became clear I couldn’t continue much farther, because there was no access to Washington. There were barricades on the interstate, and flashing lights. Shortly before noon I got off the 695 bypass to drive through Baltimore itself—sort of a nostalgia tour, because Nicola and I had lived on North Calvert Street and 31st, near the Johns Hopkins campus, when Adrian was born. I drove past the line of row houses without stopping. Most of them were boarded up, which could not fail to depress me and throw me back into the past. I took a left and turned into the east gate of the Homewood campus. I wanted to see if my old ID would still get me into the Eisenhower Library, so I parked and gave it a try. It was a bright, cool day, and I was cheered to see a few students lying around the lawn.

  I needn’t have worried—there was no one at the circulation desk. Once inside the library, I took the stairs below street level to one of the basements, a peculiar place that I remembered from the days when I had taught at the university. The electricity wasn’t functioning, but some vague illumination came from the airshafts, and I had my flashlight. With some difficulty I made my way toward the north end of that level, where a number of books by various members of my family were shelved in different sections that nevertheless came together in odd proximity around an always-deserted reading area. Within a few steps from those dilapidated couches you could find a rare copy of Robert W. Claiborne’s book How Man Learned Music. A few shelves farther on there were six or seven volumes by his son, my uncle, on popular science or philology. In the opposite direction, if you didn’t mind stooping, you would discover three books on autism by Clara Claiborne Park, while scarcely a hundred feet away there were a whole clutch of my father’s physics textbooks and histories of science. Still on the same level it was possible to unearth Edwin Avery Park’s tome (Harcourt, Brace, 1927) on modernist architecture, New Backgrounds for a New Age, as well as other books by other members of the family. And filling out the last corner of a rough square, at comfortable eye-level, in attra
ctive and colorful bindings, stood a row of my own novels, including A Princess of Roumania. It was one of the few that had come out while I was living in Baltimore, and I was touched to see they had continued to acquire the later volumes, either out of loyalty or bureaucratic inertia—certainly not from need—up to the point where everything turned digital.

  It is such a pleasure to pick up a book and hold it. I will never get used to reading something off a screen. I gathered together an assortment of texts and went back to the reading area, rectangular vinyl couches around a square table. Other people had been there recently; there were greasy paper bags, and a bedroll, and a gallon jug of water. The tiled floor was marred with ashes and charred sticks, and the skylight was dark with soot. But I had proprietary instincts, and would not be deterred. I put down my leather satchel and laid the books down in a pile, squared the edges, and with my flashlight in my hand I played a game I hadn’t played in years, since the last time I was in that library.