The Mountain Cage

by Pamela Sargent

  I had been climbing up the mountain for most of the morning, and had left the trail, arriving at my decoy house before noon. Even Sam believed that the cabin in the clearing was my dwelling. I tried the door, saw that it was still locked, then continued on my way.

  My home was farther up the slope, just out of sight of the cabin. I approached my front door, which was almost invisible near the ground; the rest of the house was concealed under slabs of rock and piles of deadwood. I stood still, letting a hidden camera lens get a good look at me. The door swung open.

  “Thank God you’re back,” Julia said as she pulled me inside and closed the door. “I was so worried. I thought you’d been caught and they were coming for me.”

  “It’s all right. I had some trouble with Sam’s car, that’s all.”

  She looked up at me; the lines around her mouth deepened. “I wish you wouldn’t go.” I took off the pack loaded with the tools and supplies unavailable at Sam’s store. Julia glanced at the pack resentfully. “It isn’t worth it.”

  “You’re probably right.” I was about to tell her of my own trip into town, but decided to wait until later.

  We went into the kitchen. Her hips were wide under her pants; her large breasts bounced as she walked. Her face was still pretty, even after all the years of hiding, her lashes thick and curly, her mouth delicate. Julia could not travel in the world as it was; no clothing, no disguise, could hide her.

  I took off my jacket and sat down, taking out my card, and my papers. My father had given them to me—the false name, the misleading address, the identification of a male—after I had pleaded for my own life. He had built my hideaway; he had risked everything for me. “Give the world a choice,” he had said, “and women will be the minority, maybe even die out completely; perhaps we can only love those like ourselves.” He had looked hard as he said it, and then he had patted me on the head, sighing as though he regretted the choice. Maybe he had. He had chosen to have a daughter, after all.

  I remembered his words. “Who knows?” he had asked. “What is it that made us two kinds who have to work together to get the next batch going? Oh, I know about evolution, but it didn’t have to be that way, or any way. It’s curious.”

  “It can’t last,” Julia said, and I did not know if she meant the world, or our escape from the world.

  There would be no Eves in their Eden, I thought. The visit to town had brought it all home to me. We all die, but we go with a conviction about the future; my extinction would not be merely personal. Only traces of the feminine would linger—an occasional expression, a posture, a feeling—in the flat-breasted male form. Love would express itself in fruitless unions, divorced from reproduction; human affections are flexible.

  I sat in my home, in my prison, treasuring the small freedom I had, the gift of a man, as it seemed such freedom had always been for those like me, and wondered again if it could have been otherwise.

  Afterword to “Fears”:

  “Fears” is a story that, as I’ve discovered over the years, seems to lend itself to being read aloud. This may be partly because it isn’t a long story; in an age when attention spans are growing ever shorter, doing a long story at a reading risks putting what audience still remains at the reading’s conclusion to sleep. But I think its modest success at readings is largely because the story is written in first person, which means that the author has only to impersonate the narrator. Writers with great dramatic gifts can get away with reading a story that requires many voices, but for those of us with less skill and less confidence in our abilities, first-person narratives are safer.

  Some writers are uncomfortable doing readings, or refuse to do them at all. Others like to read work in progress, which seems to me a dangerous undertaking, but then I’m one of those writers who doesn’t like to show my work to anyone until I have a final draft, or close to it, and even then I pick my target readers carefully. Showing a story or part of a novel to the editor you’re working with, or to another writer whose judgment you trust, makes much more sense to me than seeing how an audience of people you don’t know might react to a piece of writing that is still in the fragile state of being in progress and unfinished. The feedback can throw you off; you have to be able to hear your own voice clearly before you can expect others to hear it.

  “Fears” may also go over well in readings because the world it depicts is not an unfamiliar one. Something like it is certainly a possibility, given the increasing control we are acquiring over human reproduction. In fact, I’ve often had the feeling that we’re already living in this world to some degree. Some years ago, after a reading, someone asked me what especially had inspired this particular story. “Super Bowl Sunday,” I told her, “because during that weekend, we might as well be living in an all-male society,” and I think she believed me.

  THE NOVELLA RACE

  Anyone who wants to be a contender has to start training at an early age. Because competitions are always in Standard, my parents insisted that I speak Standard instead of our local dialect. I couldn’t use an autocompositor. We never owned a dictator either. “You’ll only have a typewriter during the race,” my mother would say. “You’d better get used to it now.”

  I had few friends as a child. You can’t have friends while training in writing, or any other sport for that matter. The other kids plugged in, swallowed RNA doses, or were hypnotized in order to learn the skills they would need as adults. I had to master the difficult arts of reading and writing. At times I hated my typewriter, the endless sentence-long exercises, and the juvenile competitions. I envied other kids and wished that I too could romp carelessly through life.

  Some people think being an athlete keeps you in shape. Everyone should take a few minutes each day to sit down and think. But competitive sports usually damage the body and torment the mind. A champion is almost always distorted in some way.

  As I grew older, I noticed that others simply marked time. They were good spectators, consumers, and socializers, but they went to their graves without attempting anything extraordinary. I wanted a gold medal, honor, and fame. Even when I wanted to quit, I knew I’d gone too far to turn back.

  By the time I was sixteen I knew I was neither a sprinter nor a distance runner. My short stories were incomplete and I did not have the endurance for the novel competition. Poetry was beyond me, although my grandmother had taken a bronze medal in the poetry race of 2024. I would have to train in the novella.

  My parents wanted me to train with Phaedon Karath, who had won four Olympic gold medals before turning professional, thus disqualifying himself from further competition. Karath was hard on his trainees, but they did well in contests. I would have preferred going to Lalia Grasso, whose students were devoted to her. But those accustomed to her gentle ways often messed up during races; they did not develop the necessary streak of cruelty nor the essential quality of egotism.

  Everyone knew about Eli Shankquist, her most talented trainee and a three-time PanAmerican gold medalist as well. During the Olympic race, the only one that matters, he became involved with the notoriously insecure Maliah Senbok. Touched by her misery, he spent a lot of time encouraging her. And what did he get? He didn’t finish his own novella and Senbok took a bronze. A lot of spectators sympathized with Shankquist, but most writers thought he was a fool.

  None of Karath’s students would have been in such a fix. So I sent off my file of fiction and waited long months for an answer. Just before my seventeenth birthday, a reply arrived on the telex. Karath wanted a personal interview. I left on the shuttle the next day.

  Karath lived in a large villa overlooking the Adriatic. As I entered, I looked around the hallway. Several green beanbag chairs stood next to heavy Victorian tables covered with illuminated manuscripts. Colorful tapestries depicting minstrels and scribes hung on the walls. The servo, a friendly silver ball with cylindrical limbs, ushered me to the study.

  The study was clean and Spartan. To my right, a computer console stood next to t
he wall. To the left, a large window overlooked the blue sea. Karath sat at his glass-topped desk, typing. He looked up and motioned to a straight-backed wood chair. I sat down.

  As I fidgeted, he got up and paced to the window. I had seen him on the screen a few times but in person he seemed shorter. He was wiry, with thick dark hair and a small, hard face. He looked, I thought apprehensively, like a young tough, in spite of his age. I waited, trying to picture myself in this house, typing away, making friends, workshopping stories, getting drunk, having an affair and doing all the things a writer does.

  Karath turned and paced to the desk. As he picked up a folder, which I recognized as my file, he muttered, “You’re Alena Dorenmatté.”

  I tried to smile. “That’s me.”

  “What makes you think you belong here?”

  “I want the best training in the novella I can get.”

  “That’s a crock of shit. You want to fuck and get drunk and sit around thinking artistic thoughts and congratulating yourself on your sensitivity. You won’t sweat blood over a typewriter. You want to be coddled.”

  He threw my file across the desk. It landed on the floor with a plop. I picked it up, clutching it to my chest.

  “Let me fill you in, Dorenmatté. There’s nothing but cow pies in that file. Understand? I don’t think you could win a local.”

  “I won a local last year, I placed first in the BosWash.” He couldn’t have reviewed my citations very carefully. “Why’d you ask me here anyway? You could have insulted me over the relay.”

  “Maybe the truth wouldn’t sink in over the relay. I like to say what I think face to face. You’re not a writer. Your stories are nothing but clichés and adolescent tragedy. You can’t plot and you can’t create characters. You have nothing to say. You’d make a fool of yourself in Olympic competition. Cow pies, that’s what you write. Go home and learn how to socialize so you don’t ruin your life.”

  My face was burning. “I don’t know why anybody trains with you. If the other trainers were that mean, no one would ever write again.”

  He flew at me, seized the file, and tore it in half, scattering papers over the floor. Terrified, I shrank back.

  “Let me tell you something, Dorenmatté. A writer doesn’t give up. He takes punishment, listens to criticism, and keeps writing. If he doesn’t make it, it’s because he wasn’t any good. I don’t run a nursery, I train writers. Now get out of here. I have work to do.”

  I stood up, realizing that I couldn’t respond without bursting into tears. Grasping at my last threads of dignity, I turned and walked slowly out of the room.

  I could have applied to another trainer. Instead I moped for months. At last my father issued an ultimatum: I would have to move to a dormitory and learn to socialize or enter a competition.

  Even my parents were deserting me. I moved out and rented an apartment in Montreal. I stayed inside for weeks, unable to move, barely able to eat. One night I tried to hang myself, but I could never tie knots properly and only fell to the floor, acquiring a nasty bruise on my thigh. Fate had given me another chance.

  I had forgotten that the PanAmerican Games were being held in Montreal that year. Somehow, even in my hopeless state, they drew me. I found myself entering the qualifying meet in paragraphs. I lugged my typewriter to the amphitheater and sat with a thousand others at desks under hot lights while the spectators came and went, cheering for their favorites. Several writers made use of the always-popular “creative anguish” ploy, slapping their foreheads in frustration while throwing away wads of paper. Ramon Hogarth, winner of the West Coast local, danced around his desk after completing each sentence. My style was standard. I smoked heavily and gulped coffee while slouching over my machine. Occasionally I clutched my gut in agony, drawing some applause.

  I qualified for the semifinals and was given a small room filled with monitoring devices. The judges, of course, had to watch for cheating, and spectators all over the hemisphere would be viewing us. I tried to preserve my poise at the typewriter, but gradually I forgot everything except my novella. I wrote and rewrote, rarely taking breaks, knowing that I was up against trained contenders. Whenever I became discouraged, I remembered the mocking voice of Phaedon Karath.

  I made it to the finals. I recall that I envied the short-story writers, who had a four-month deadline, and pitied the novelists, who had to suffer for a year. I can remember the times when my words flowed freely, but there were moments when I was ready to disqualify myself. I agonized while awaiting the decision and wondered if I could ever face another race.

  I placed sixth. Delighted, I got drunk and daringly sent off my sixth-place novella to Phaedon Karath. A few days later, his reply appeared on my telex: STILL COW PIES BUT IMPROVEMENT STOP COME TO ITALY STOP SEE IF YOU CAN TAKE REAL WORKOUT STOP.

  At the villa I had to work on sentences for months before I was allowed to go on to paragraphs. Karath insisted on extensive rewriting, although constant rewriting could kill you off in competition as easily as sloppy unreworked first drafts. He rarely praised anyone.

  We workshopped a lot, tearing each other’s work apart. Reina Takake, a small golden-skinned woman who became my closest friend, used to run from the room in tears. The more she cried, the more Karath picked on her. We would spend hours together planning tortures for him and occasionally writing about the tortures in vivid detail.

  At last Reina packed and left, saying good-bye to no one. Karath told us of her departure during a workshop, watching us with his gray eyes as he said that Reina couldn’t cut it, that she had no talent, and that it was useless to waste time on someone who couldn’t take criticism.

  I hated him for that. I stood up and screamed that he was a petty tyrant and a sadist. I told him he had no understanding of gentle souls. I said a few other things.

  He waited until I finished. Then he looked around the room and said, “The rest of you can continue. Dorenmatte, step outside.”

  Trembling, I followed him out. He led me down the hall and stopped in front of my room. He turned, grabbed me by the arms, and shoved me inside. I stumbled and almost fell.

  “Stay in there,” he said. “You’re not coming out until you finish a specific assignment.”

  “What assignment?” I asked, puzzled.

  “The novella you’re going to write, and rewrite if necessary. You’ll write about Takake and about me if you like. Do it any way you please, but you have to write about Takake. Now get to work.”

  He slammed the door quickly. I heard him turn the lock. I screamed, bellowed, and cursed until I was hoarse. Karath did not respond.

  I spent a few hours in futile weeping and a few days in plotting an escape. Food was brought to me, occasionally with wine; the upper door panel would open and the amiable servo would lower the food into my room. At first I refused it but after a few days I was too hungry to resist.

  I soon realized I’d never get out of my windowless room until I wrote the novella. I took a bath, then bitterly went to work. At first I rambled, noting every passing thought, incorporating some of the paragraphs Reina and I had written about torturing Karath. But soon a particular plot suggested itself. I outlined the story and began again.

  I worked at least a month, maybe more, before I had a draft to show Karath. Oddly enough, I could not sustain my anger at him nor my grief at Reina’s departure. I understood what had happened and what I had felt, but these events and feelings were simply material to be shaped and structured.

  I gave my final draft to the servo and waited. At last the door opened. I made my way downstairs to Karath’s study.

  He sat behind his desk perusing my novella. I cleared my throat. His cold eyes surveyed me as he said, “It isn’t bad, Dorenmatté. It wouldn’t make it in a race, but there might be some hope for you.” As I basked in this high praise, he threw the manuscript at me. “Now go back to work and clean up some of your sentences.”

  A year later I took the gold medal in the PanAmerican Games.

&n
bsp; But it was Olympic gold I wanted, the high point for a champion. There would be publicity, perhaps other competitions if my health held out. But contests were for the young. Eventually I would become a trainer or sign contracts with the entertainment industry; gold-medal winners can get a lot for senso plots or dream construction. Maybe novelists can do serialized week-long dreams and short-story writers are better at commercials, but you can’t beat a novella writer for an evening’s sustained entertainment. Since practically no one reads now, except of course the critics, most of them failed writers who write comments on our work for one another and serve as judges during competitions, there isn’t much else a champion can do when the contest years are over.

  The Olympics! Karath rode us mercilessly in preparation for them. He presented countless distractions: robots outside with jackhammers, emotional crises, dirty tricks meant to disorient us, impossible deadlines.

  Two years before the Games, which like the ancient Olympics are held only every four years, I had to enter preliminaries. I got through them easily. The night before I left for Rome, Karath and the others workshopped a story of mine and tore it to shreds. I recall the hatred I saw in the faces of my fellow trainees. None had qualified this time, although all had won locals or regionals. They would undoubtedly gossip maliciously about me when I left and point out to each other how inferior my work really was.

  I arrived in Rome the day before the opening ceremonies. The part of the Olympic Village set aside for writers was a scenic spot. The small stone houses were surrounded on three sides by flower gardens and wooded areas. Below us lay all of Rome; the dome of St. Peter’s, the crowded streets, the teeming arcologies. I wanted to explore it all, but I had to start sizing up the competition.