I could have told her a thing or two about how well we molded and guided our own world, but suddenly that seemed as if it might work against us. I kept my mouth shut.
“Our solution is perfect,” Ada said. She put her hand between Toby’s ears and scratched. “What do dogs do but lay around all day anyway? You could keep him as fat and lazy and silly as you want.”
“That will simply never happen,” Jessica said. “We will never be able to convince all of the people. In fact we will be able to convince very few. If you throw Holly off the bridge again, you could cause a war in here. I want you to think carefully. It won’t be nice if there is artillery shelling going on in your mother’s lungs. Hand-to-hand combat in her stomach. Swordplay in her heart. There will be cell damage. We are fighting for our very world. Would you destroy an entire people, an entire world, for your Mother?”
“Yes,” Ada said at once.
I was glad I didn’t have to answer that one. I didn’t even want to think about it.
“And what will you do, Ada, if you force our society into a state of primitive savagery,” Jessica said. “How do you think Holly will like having little bands of hunter/gatherers roaming around in her liver?”
“If her mind is free, she’ll be able to handle her liver.”
“We won’t move to a dog,” Jessica said, and then she was quiet.
Ada took her feet. “One more time, Barry.”
“But what about all those people?” I asked.
“Shut up.” Ada dropped Mom’s feet and wiped tears from her own eyes with a big blue-checked handkerchief from her back pocket. I shut up and took Mom under the arms again.
We threw her over the side. Jessica didn’t even scream this time.
We pulled her up after only a few bounces. Ada looked grim, and I feared that this whole business would fail. All those people. I could be honest with myself, at least in little short bursts. I understood how entire lives could be lived in minutes. I knew that Jessica was right when she said the nanopeople were as real as me. I understood that some of them were dying. We rolled Mom over. She looked dead herself, but when I grabbed her wrist, I felt a pulse. Ada sat her up and gently slapped her face over and over again. I scooted back and grabbed a soda out of the picnic basket and poured a little in my hand and flicked it at Mom. No response. Toby pushed his way in between Ada and me and licked Mom’s face again.
Some time passed.
Then Jessica opened Mom’s eyes.
“So much has changed.” Jessica sounded weak, diminished somehow. “But one thing is still firm. We will not abandon our world.”
Ada sighed. I hoped she wouldn’t want to toss Mom over the side again.
“We propose a compromise,” Jessica said.
“We’re listening,” Ada said.
“We propose to let Holly have more control over her life,” Jessica said. “We have combed through her memory and found a set of activities that we feel prepared to tolerate. Ballroom dancing, for example.”
Ada’s face got absolutely purple. Her hands closed in fists and opened in claws, closed and opened. When she spoke her voice was steady and cold but coiled like a spring, cobra tight. “You’re telling me that you will allow Dr. Holly Ketchum, a respected physicist and leading authority on nanotechnology, a woman so full of curiosity and life that some people simply have to step out of her light or get burned, a woman vibrating with sexual vitality and gentle innocent love and openness for almost everyone—” She jumped up and shouted, “A woman who thrives on the adrenaline rush of white water and rock faces and free fall— you’re telling me you’re going to allow this woman to do ballroom dancing? Is that what you’re telling me?”
“Well, yes. Among other things.”
“Ada.” I grabbed her hand, and the look she turned down on me would have loosened the bowels of a biker. “Let me try,” I said. I thought she was going to say something to make me feel small or even hit me, but she jerked her hand away and stomped off to her truck instead. Toby and I watched as she kicked big dents in the door of her truck. When she stopped yelling and slumped to the ground, I turned to Mom and spoke to Jessica.
“If there is to be a compromise, Jessica,” I said. “It will have to be on our terms. Or if you think about that a little, it’ll have to be on Mom’s terms. You’re going to have to learn to live with what your world wants, not what you want for your world.”
“Well, we did come up with this list.”
“You’re going to have to let Mom come out and tell you want she wants.”
“But she takes such chances!”
“You’ll just have to learn to trust her,” I said.
Jessica didn’t reply, and I was suddenly at a loss. It seemed clear what must happen next, but I didn’t know how to convince the nanopeople. I felt a hand on my shoulder and jerked my head around in time to see Ada squat down beside me.
“Barry’s right,” Ada said. “You must turn inward. You must let Mom take care of the stuff outside. You don’t have what it takes to deal with things out here. We can keep throwing you off the bridge until your society is completely disrupted. If it starts to look like those of you who are left are getting used to bungee jumping, we can do something else. Access Mom’s memory of alligator wrestling.”
Jessica squinted Mom’s eyes for a moment then jerked her head to the right as if Ada had slapped her.
“Look at ultra-light stunt flying,” I said, encouraged again by Ada’s support.
Jessica jerked Mom’s head to the left.
“Do we need to go on?” Ada asked. “We won’t quit.”
Jessica let Mom’s shoulders slump. She sighed. “We’ll try it your way,” she said. “We’ll try it. But strictly on a trial basis!”
“No conditions,” Ada said.
Jessica rolled Mom’s eyes for a long time, then she said, “You win.”
A smile grew on Mom’s face, bigger and bigger, until she laughed out loud. “Ada! Barry!” She struggled with the ropes around her wrists. “I knew I could count on you two.”
I could see it was Mom, something about the way the body was controlled convinced me Mom was to some degree in charge, but how much Mom was it? I worried that the nanopeople would have her on a short leash.
Toby lunged across my lap to get at her. The entire back end of his body wagged as he licked her face, and he could not contain his joy to the point that he peed all over me. I didn’t know how Ada felt about it, but a Mom real enough to make a dog pee was a Mom real enough for me. I leaned in and kissed her cheek.
“Untie me,” Mom said, twisting her head this way and that to avoid Toby’s tongue.
Ada pushed the dog away and pulled the big blade from the sheath on her belt. She turned Mom around and cut her wrists loose.
Mom’s hair turned brown even as she stripped off her sweater. Her eyes cleared; her skin tightened. She pulled the dreary housedress from first one shoulder and then the other and wiggled it down to her hips. She bounced a little and pulled the dress along with her underwear down her thighs and over her knees. Ada undid the bungee boots and pulled them off Mom’s feet. Mom’s wrinkles disappeared and her bones straightened. When she stood, nude and magnificent and beaming a big smile at us, she was Mom in body again. Well, in a way. This was Mom, I thought, as she must have looked at thirty or so. Long reddish brown hair falling over slightly freckled shoulders. Pale blue eyes. Small high breasts. Long strong legs.
“Shall we go home, Mother?” Ada asked.
“Not so fast.” Mom sat down on the bridge and pulled the bungee boots on again. “I need to pin down just who’s boss in here.” She climbed up on the bridge rail, and with a wild scream of joy did a perfect swan dive into the abyss.
We watched the arch of her dive and listened to her yell and watched her bounce.
“Do you suppose we’ve just postponed things?” I asked.
“What do you mean?”
“Well, what do you think will happen to her when we’ve either got nanopeople of our own or we’ve died? How about then?”
Ada seemed to think about that as we listened to Mom whoop at the upswing of each bounce.
“Well, maybe we’d better pull her up and get some motherly advice,” Ada said.
No Comet
Convinced that my slant on Bohr’s version of the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics was our last hope, I bullied Jane, who didn’t want to be married to me anymore, and Sacha into cooperating with a final desperate attempt to save the world.
“This is stupid, Tim,” Jane said, her voice softened a little by the brown paper bag over her head.
“La la, la la, la la,” Sacha sang. She banged the heels of her shoes against the legs of her chair in time to her tune. Wearing a bag over her head was still fun, I thought, but our daughter was seven and had fidgeting down to a fine art. How long would she stick with me?
I’d pushed away my plate, but there was a sticky spot, orange marmalade probably, where I would have liked to put my hands. I put them in my lap instead. Breakfast had been tense. Jane had banged some pots around, scorched some eggs, burned some toast, warmed some bacon. I wished I’d brushed my teeth before I put a bag over my own head.
Everything was tan, but not an even tan; I imagined it was like looking through the dry, mottled skin of some desert creature, maybe a horned toad. There was a seam where the brown paper overlapped and joined to make a bag, and I couldn’t see much light through that double layer. If I tilted my head back carefully, I could see what looked like the letter H in some fancy font (except for the way the seam came up and touched the cross piece of the H) made from the overlaps needed to square off and seal the bottom of the bag.
“I don’t think I could have missed the fact that a comet is about to hit the Earth, Tim,” Jane said.
“Do you read the newspapers?”
“No.”
“Do you watch TV?”
“You know I don’t.”
“How about the radio?”
“Well, no. Not today.”
“None of your goofy friends do either.” I nailed down my point. “So just how do you think you would have heard about it?”
“That tone is exactly why I say we need to live apart, Tim.”
“Boop boop boop be doop,” Sacha sang.
“Everyone just relax,” I said. “And keep your bags on.” Things were slipping away. I needed to circle our wagons. It was vital that none of us give the world outside even a fleeting glance.
My own breath aside, the smell inside my bag reminded me of all the things you can carry in a brown paper bag. Curiously, the first thing that came to mind was books. Surely I’d carried home more groceries in brown paper bags than books. In fact, the name of the grocery store was printed right on the bag in red letters. Nevertheless, I thought of books, and clothes, and moving. I thought of garbage in the bags before I thought of groceries. Maybe it was because groceries spend so little time in the bags. I knew that if I packed my stuff up in paper bags, the bags might just sit for months in some cold new place.
“This isn’t just my plan, Jane,” I said. “The president has been on TV urging people not to look. Forests have been lighted to smoke up the skies. Teams are everywhere in primitive areas making sure no one looks.”
“Even if there is a giant comet about to hit the Earth, just what good do you expect these bags to do?” Jane asked.
“Things that might happen can’t be separated from the devices you use to measure them,” I said. “You can’t look at something without changing it.”
“What?”
“The moon’s not there if no one is looking. Or in our case, the comet.”
“Like the tree in the forest?”
“Sort of,” I said. “But that was philosophy. This is science.”
“Oh, right. Sure.”
“I have to go to the bathroom,” Sacha said.
“Soon, honey,” I said. “Just hang on a little while longer.”
“Someone would peek,” Jane said.
“Maybe. But it won’t be us.”
“How can that matter?”
“This is the same argument you use for not voting, Jane.” I knew I should be soothing her instead of snapping at her, but I couldn’t help it. “It’s irresponsible. If everyone thought like you, no one would vote.”
“Who’s talking about voting? We’re sitting around the kitchen table with grocery sacks over our heads!”
Sacha giggled.
I decided to try silence on Jane. I could hear my own breathing against the sides of the bag, and with any little movement there was a rustle like dry autumn leaves in a green plastic trash sack. I could hear birds too. They would be in the feeder outside the window over the sink. They would fly away if they caught us looking at them.
I could pull the bag away from my face a little and look straight down and see my white shirt over the gut hanging into my lap. I could suck the gut in; I could sigh it out. I could see my tan slacks, my black loafers, and the black and white kitchen tiles.
Strange, but I couldn’t see the name of our grocery store through the bag. Had I put the bag on backwards? I twisted it around. I still couldn’t see the letters, and then I didn’t know which way the bag was. Were the red letters to the front or to the back? I felt unhooked, disoriented, lost.
Things suddenly got brighter. It is my opinion that that was when the comet touched the atmosphere, and because it didn’t hit just then, I think the last person on Earth quit looking at it at precisely that moment.
“Don’t you see the sudden light of the fire?”
“A cloud probably just moved away from the sun,” Jane said.
I thought I heard some uncertainty in her voice. “That’s what you’d like to think,” I said.
“How long are we going to play this game, Tim?”
How long? Why, just until the comet’s gone, I almost said. It hit me then that Jane’s question was a good one. If finally no one was looking at the comet, did that mean it went away, or did it mean the comet was hanging frozen just inside the atmosphere, filling the entire sky, ready to plunge down on us as soon as we looked? Didn’t that mean we could never look? Didn’t that mean we were doomed to sit there at the kitchen table with bags over our heads forever?
“It makes no sense,” Jane said. “What about intelligences on other planets? What if some alien shaman is looking at your comet through a telescope?”
“One of your saucer people?”
“At least there’s good evidence for them. Unlike your stupid comet.”
“Jane,” I said, “if you looked out the window right now you’d see the sky filled with fire, and just because you looked, the comet would crash down and blow us all up.”
“You’re scaring me, Daddy,” Sacha said.
“Don’t worry, honey.” I would have liked to touch her hand, but I couldn’t reach her. “Nothing can hurt you if you keep your head in the bag.”
“You’re teaching her to be an ostrich!”
“What’s an ostrich?” Sacha asked.
“Is that why you won’t let me have the weekends?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“I really, really have to go, Daddy,” Sacha said.
I heard them shifting in their chairs, moving around, trying to be quiet, but not succeeding. I heard them whispering. Fear turned me to stone. The game was up. I pictured Jane quietly slipping off her bag and setting it aside, pictured her carefully removing Sacha’s bag, saw Jane grin and roll her eyes in my direction and put her finger to her lips so Sacha would be quiet,
saw them both looking at me stiff in my bag, the two of them, the little alien, the Russian girl, our surprising blond Sacha, and the big one, looking so sweetly sad suddenly, Jane. It wasn’t that she hated me, I realized. She’d moved on when I wasn’t looking. She was bored, restless; we had so little in common these days. She wandered like a wounded bird, one leg missing maybe, circling east, and I plodded ever westward. What in the world did we have to talk about?
I saw Sacha make an O of her mouth when she looked at the window and saw the comet peeking in at us like an angry red eye filling the sky. I saw the comet leap to Earth and fire the trees, the city, our house. Burning hurricane winds knocked down our walls and crisped our skin and peeled our bones.
I cried out.
Jane snatched the bag from my head.
Sunshine turned the refrigerator into a gleaming white block, an alien monolith that had popped into existence among our chrome pots and wooden bowls. From somewhere far away came the tiny tinkle tinkle of an ice-cream truck. I looked at the window over the sink, and in a flutter of squawks and black wings, birds fled the feeder.
“It’s easy to see what happened,” I said. “You were right, Jane. Someone peeked. But we didn’t. And because we didn’t, by the time we looked, we’d split off into a reality in which the comet never existed in the first place. We’re saved!”
“Oh, Daddy.” Sacha hugged me quickly, then ran off to the bathroom.
“Okay,” Jane said, “you can have every other weekend. But we take the cat.”
“What cat?” I asked.
There Is Danger
There is danger in regarding her as a goddess, danger in speculating about the lazy smile she directs at me over the Dover sole, the lemony finger bowls, the steaming rice, and bright green spears of asparagus, her gray eyes dancing with golden candlelight, danger in the provocative tilt of her head, her long chestnut hair flowing over her bare shoulder.
Meet Me in the Moon Room Page 6