The Unreal and the Real, Selected Stories of Ursula K. Le Guin Volume 1: Where on Earth

by Ursula K. Le Guin

There’s Kate. There’s Kate’s ex-husband. And there’s Lin. Lin’s a good swimmer, always was, I’m not worried about Lin. But Kate’s in trouble. She needs help. Kate! Don’t wear yourself out, honey, don’t kick so hard. The water’s very wide. Save your strength, swim slowly, sweetheart, Kate my child!

  There’s young Chew. And look there, there’s the doctor, in right over his head. And the receptionist. And the old woman with the doll. But there are so many more, so many. If I reach out my hand to one, a hundred will reach for it, a thousand, a thousand million, and pull me down and drown me. I can’t save one child, one single child. I can’t save myself.

  Then let it be so. Take my hand, child! stranger in the darkness, in the deep waters, take my hand. Swim with me, while we can. Let us be drowned together, for it’s certain we shall not be saved alone.

  It’s silent, out here in the deep waters. I can’t see the faces any more.

  Dorothea, there’s someone following us. Don’t look back.

  I’m not Lot’s wife, Louis, I’m Gideon’s wife. I can look back, and still not turn to salt. Besides, my blood was never salt enough. It’s you who shouldn’t look back.

  Do you take me for Orpheus? I was a good pianist, but not that good. But I admit, it scares me to look back. I don’t really want to.

  I just did. There’s two of them. A woman and a man.

  I was afraid of that.

  Do you think it’s them?

  Who else would follow us?

  Yes, it’s them, our husband and our wife. Go back! Go back! This is no place for you!

  This is the place for everyone, Dorothea.

  Yes, but not yet, not yet. O Gideon, go back! He doesn’t hear me. I can’t speak clearly any more. Louis, you call to them.

  Go back! Don’t follow us! They can’t hear us, Dorothea. Look how they come, as if the sand were water. Don’t they know there’s no water here?

  I don’t know what they know, Louis. I have forgotten. Gideon, O Gideon, take my hand!

  Anna, take my hand!

  Can they hear us? Can they touch us?

  I don’t know. I have forgotten.

  It’s cold, I’m cold. It’s too deep, too far to go. I have reached out my hand, and reached out my hand into the darkness, but I couldn’t tell what good it did; if I held up some child for a while, or if some shadow hand reached back to me, I don’t know. I can’t tell the way. Back on the dry land they were right. They told me not to grieve. They told me not to look. They told me to forget. They told me eat my lunch and take my pills that end in zil and ine. And they were right. They told me to be quiet, not to shout, not to cry out aloud. Be quiet now, be good. And they were right. What’s the good in shouting? What’s the good in shouting Help me, help, I’m drowning! when all the rest of them are drowning too? I heard them crying Help me, help me, please. But now I hear nothing. I hear the sound of the deep waters only. O take my hand, my love, I’m cold, cold, cold.

  The water is wide, I cannot get over,

  And neither have I wings to fly.

  Give me a boat that will carry two,

  And both shall row, my love and I.

  There is, oh, there is another shore! Look at the light, the light of morning on the rocks, the light on the shores of morning. I am light. The weight’s gone. I am light.

  But it is the same shore, Gideanna.

  Then we have come home. We rowed all night in darkness, in the cold, and we came home: the home where we have never been before, the home we never left. Take my hand, and step ashore with me, my sister life, my brother death. Look: it is the beginning place. Here we begin, here by the flood that parts us.

  The Lost Children

  He lifted the silver pipe to his lips and played. In his patchwork jacket and multistripe pants and two-tone shoes, he walked the city streets piping a tune. What tune? They turned and listened, passersby, businessmen, shoppers, secretaries, smokers, tourists, bag ladies, beggars. As the piper went past they cocked their heads, straining their ears, with an inward look in their eyes. Did they hear the tune? Yes—No—? Some of them followed him a little way, trying to hear what he was playing on his pipe. A bag lady shook her shopping cart in rage and shouted obscenities after him. A Japanese visitor ran to get ahead of him to take his photograph, but lost him in the crowds. A lawyer fell into step beside him, trying to hear the sound of the pipe, which surely was very high and sweet; but he could catch only the faintest sound on the very edge of hearing, and he turned off at Broadway. Three boys ran shoving and yelling past the piper through the crowds, their canvas and plastic shoes gaudier than his jacket. A woman coming out of a clothing store stopped, her back stooped, her lips parted, and gazed after him. Her little daughter tugged at her hand, impatient. “Mama, I want to go home, let’s go to the bus stop, mama!” Inside the mother, inside each of the women and the men he passed, a child jumped up crying in a high voice, “I hear it! I hear it! Listen!” But she could not hear, and her daughter paid no attention, did not listen, tugged at her hand, and she followed, obedient. Children shot past running or on skateboards or rollerblades. Men and women strolled or hurried on, turned to their business with a shrug or a comment about street musicians, continued their conversation about municipal bonds, the football game, the price of halibut, the trial, the election, the breakdown. Some of the men, some of the women felt a little flutter of the breath, a kind of gasp or a slight pang at the breastbone, and others felt nothing at all, when the child inside them broke out, broke free, and ran invisibly after the piper, inaudibly crying, “Wait! Wait for me!” as the gaudy, nimble figure passed on through the throngs, threading the traffic at the crossings, always playing his silver pipe. Among the crowds these escaped children passed quick and slight as dust motes or wisps of steam, more and more of them, a cloud, a comet-tail of immaterial children following the piper, skipping, capering, dancing to the tune he played, dancing right out of the city, through the suburbs, across the superhighways, till they came at last to the malls and the fast food strip. Did the piper go on past the malls towards the hidden country or did he slip away from the children among the endless aisles of the vast, windowless buildings? Did the children catch up to him or did they lose him, distracted by the signs and the goods, the toy stores, the candy stores? They dispersed quite suddenly, all the escaped children, wandering off into the shops and theaters and arcades to enter into electronic games, jumping and shooting and destroying one another in puffs of sparks, to enter into videos of isneyland and whizneyland and busineyland, running through towers and castles of smiling machinery and tunnels and orbits of machinery screaming. There the lost children are. When they are hungry they feed on the sweet greasy smoke from the grills where hamburger meat is fried forever, while the loudspeakers forever play the piper’s tune.

  Texts

  Messages came, Johanna thought, usually years too late, or years before one could crack their code or had even learned the language they were in. Yet they came increasingly often and were so urgent, so compelling in their demand that she read them, that she do something, as to force her at last to take refuge from them. She rented, for the month of January, a little house with no telephone in a seaside town that had no mail delivery. She had stayed in Klatsand several times in summer; winter, as she had hoped, was even quieter than summer. A whole day would go by without her hearing or speaking a word. She did not buy the paper or turn on the television, and the one morning she thought she ought to find some news on the radio she got a program in Finnish from Astoria. But the messages still came. Words were everywhere.

  Literate clothing was no real problem. She remembered the first print dress she had ever seen, years ago, a genuine print dress with typography involved in the design—green on white, suitcases and hibiscus and the names Riviera and Capri and Paris occurring rather blobbily from shoulder seam to hem, sometimes right side up, sometimes upside do
wn. Then it had been, as the saleswoman said, very unusual. Now it was hard to find a T-shirt that did not urge political action, or quote lengthily from a dead physicist, or at least mention the town it was for sale in. All this she had coped with, she had even worn.

  But too many things were becoming legible.

  She had noticed in earlier years that the lines of foam left by waves on the sand after stormy weather lay sometimes in curves that looked like handwriting, cursive lines broken by spaces, as if in words; but it was not until she had been alone for over a fortnight and had walked many times down to Wreck Point and back that she found she could read the writing. It was a mild day, nearly windless, so that she did not have to march briskly but could mosey along between the foam-lines and the water’s edge where the sand reflected the sky. Every now and then a quiet winter breaker driving up and up the beach would drive her and a few gulls ahead of it onto the drier sand; then as the wave receded she and the gulls would follow it back. There was not another soul on the long beach. The sand lay as firm and even as a pad of pale brown paper, and on it a recent wave at its high mark had left a complicated series of curves and bits of foam. The ribbons and loops and lengths of white looked so much like handwriting in chalk that she stopped, the way she would stop, half willingly, to read what people scratched in the sand in summer. Usually it was “Jason + Karen” or paired initials in a heart; once, mysteriously and memorably, three initials and the dates 1973–1984, the only such inscription that spoke of a promise not made but broken. Whatever those eleven years had been, the length of a marriage? a child’s life? they were gone, and the letters and numbers also were gone when she came back by where they had been, with the tide rising. She had wondered then if the person who wrote them, had written them to be erased. But these foam words lying on the brown sand now had been written by the erasing sea itself. If she could read them they might tell her a wisdom a good deal deeper and bitterer than she could possibly swallow. Do I want to know what the sea writes? she thought, but at the same time she was already reading the foam, which though in vaguely cuneiform blobs rather than letters of any alphabet was perfectly legible as she walked along beside it. “Yes,” it read, “esse hes hetu tokye to’ ossusess ekyes. Seham hute’ u.” (When she wrote it down later she used the apostrophe to represent a kind of stop or click like the last sound in “Yep!”) As she read it over, backing up some yards to do so, it continued to say the same thing, so she walked up and down it several times and memorized it. Presently, as bubbles burst and the blobs began to shrink, it changed here and there to read, “Yes, e hes etu kye to’ ossusess kye. ham te u.” She felt that this was not significant change but mere loss, and kept the original text in mind. The water of the foam sank into the sand and the bubbles dried away till the marks and lines lessened into a faint lacework of dots and scraps, half legible. It looked enough like delicate bits of fancywork that she wondered if one could also read lace or crochet.

  When she got home she wrote down the foam words so that she would not have to keep repeating them to remember them, and then she looked at the machine-made Quaker lace tablecloth on the little round dining table. It was not hard to read but was, as one might expect, rather dull. She made out the first line inside the border as “pith wot pith wot pith wot” interminably, with a “dub” every thirty stitches where the border pattern interrupted.

  But the lace collar she had picked up at a secondhand clothing store in Portland was a different matter entirely. It was handmade, handwritten. The script was small and very even. Like the Spencerian hand she had been taught fifty years ago in the first grade, it was ornate but surprisingly easy to read. “My soul must go,” was the border, repeated many times, “my soul must go, my soul must go,” and the fragile webs leading inward read, “sister, sister, sister, light the light.” And she did not know what she was to do, or how she was to do it.

  Sleepwalkers

  John Felburne

  I told the maid not to come to clean the cabin before four o’clock, when I go running. I explained that I’m a night person and write late and sleep in, mornings. Somehow it came out that I’m writing a play. She said, “A stage play?” I said yes, and she said, “I saw one of those once.” What a wonderful line. It was some high school production, it turned out some musical. I told her mine was a rather different kind of play, but she didn’t ask about it. And actually there would be no way to explain to that sort of woman what I write about. Her life experience is so incredibly limited. Living out here, cleaning rooms, going home and watching TV—Jeopardy probably. I thought of trying to put her in my characters notebook and got as far as “Ava: the Maid,” and then there was nothing to write. It would be like trying to describe a glass of water. She’s what people who say “nice” mean when they say, “She’s nice.” She’d be completely impossible in a play, because she never does or says anything but what everybody else does and says. She talks in clichés. She is a cliché. Forty or so, middle-sized, heavy around the hips, pale, not very good complexion, blondish—half the white women in America look like that. Pressed out of a mold, made with a cookie cutter. I run for an hour, hour and a half, while she’s cleaning the cabin, and I was thinking, she’d never do anything like running, probably doesn’t do any exercise at all. People like that don’t take any control over their lives. People like her in a town like this live a mass-produced existence, stereotypes, getting their ideas from the TV. Sleepwalkers. That would make a good title, Sleepwalkers. But how could you write meaningfully about a person who’s totally predictable? Even the sex would be boring.

  There’s a woman in the creekside cabin this week. When I jog down to the beach, afternoons, she watches me. I asked Ava about her. She said she’s Mrs. McAn, comes every summer for a month. Ava said, “She’s very nice,” of course. McAn has rather good legs. But old.

  Katharine McAn

  If I had an air gun I could hide on my deck and pop that young man one on the buttock when he comes pumping past in his little purple stretchies. He eyes me.

  I saw Virginia Herne in Hambleton’s today. Told her the place was turning into a goddamn writers colony, with her collecting all these Pulitzers or whatever they are, and that young man in the shingled cabin sitting at his computer till four in the morning. It’s so quiet at the Hideaway that I can hear the thing clicking and peeping all night. “Maybe he’s a very diligent accountant,” Virginia said. “Not in shiny purple stretch shorts,” I said, She said, “Oh, that’s John” Somebody, “yes, he’s had a play produced, in the East somewhere, he told me.” I said, “What’s he doing here, sitting at your feet?” and she said, “No, he told me he needed to escape the pressures of culture, so he’s spending a summer in the West.” Virginia looks very well. She has that dark, sidelong flash in her eye. A dangerous woman, mild as milk. “How’s Ava?” she asked. Ava house-sat her place up on Breton Head last summer when she and Jaye were traveling, and she takes an interest in her, though she doesn’t know the story Ava told me. I said Ava was doing all right.

  I think she is, in fact. She still walks carefully, though. Maybe that’s what Virginia saw. Ava walks like a tai ji walker, like a woman on a high wire. One foot directly in front of the other, and never any sudden movements.

  I had tea ready when she knocked, my first morning here. We sat at the table in the kitchen nook, just like the other summers, and talked. Mostly about Jason. He’s in tenth grade now, plays baseball, skateboards, surfboards, crazy to get one of those windsail things and go up to Hood River—“Guess the ocean isn’t enough for him,” Ava said. Her voice is without color, speaking of him. My guess is that the boy is like his father, physically at least, and that troubles or repels her, though she clings to him loyally, cleaves to him. And there might be a jealousy of him as the survivor: Why you, and not her? I don’t know what Jason knows or feels about all that. The little I’ve seen of him when he comes by here, he seems a sweet boy, caught up in these sports boys s
pend themselves on, I suppose because at least they involve doing something well.

  Ava and I always have to re-agree on what work she’s to do when I’m here. She claims if she doesn’t vacuum twice a week and take out the trash, Mr. Shoto will “get after” her. I doubt he would, but it’s her job and her conscience. So she’s to do that, and look in every day or so to see if I need anything. Or to have a cup of tea with me. She likes Earl Grey.

  Ken Shoto

  She’s reliable. I told Deb at breakfast, you don’t know how lucky we are. The Brinnesis have to hire anything they can pick up, high school girls that don’t know how to make a bed and won’t learn, ethnics that can’t talk the language and move on just when you’ve got them trained. After all, who wants a job cleaning motel rooms? Only somebody who hasn’t enough education or self-respect to find something better. Ava wouldn’t have kept at it if I treated her the way the Brinnesis treat their maids, either. I knew right away we were in luck with this one. She knows how to clean and she’ll work for a dollar over minimum wage. So why shouldn’t I treat her like one of us? After four years? If she wants to clean one cabin at seven in the morning and another one at four in the afternoon, that’s her business. She works it out with the customers. I don’t interfere. I don’t push her. “Get off Ava’s case, Deb,” I told her this morning. “She’s reliable, she’s honest, and she’s permanent—she’s got that boy in the high school here. What more do you want? I tell you, she takes half the load off my back!”