Dancing with Eternity

by John Patrick Lowrie

  They were still concerned. They didn’t need to be. “You don’t need to be,” I said. “I mean, I’m okay. You don’t have to—Don’t worry. You don’t have to worry.”

  “We all need some rest,” Archie said.

  “Yeah,” Alice agreed. “We should just go to the hotel, the rooming house.”

  “Right.” Steel was still looking into my eyes. “You’re all right now? You can walk?”

  “Yeah, I’m fine. I’m okay. It’s all right. I’m fine.”

  We set off, Steel on my arm (but in reality making sure I didn’t fall over) as I wondered what had just happened to me. In my heart there was no doubt—I had just had a brief conversation with my wife, my wife who had died twelve centuries ago. That had been my experience. It didn’t feel like I was lying to myself or fooling myself. It didn’t feel like I was making it up. My head was already saying something different, coming up with explanations: I had been overcome with emotions, fatigue, the strangeness of the place, the stress of our mission here. Neither side won; my heart supplied its certainty, my head its skepticism.

  We continued walking through Nazareth.

  By the time we crossed the footbridge and walked up the sandy trail to Mrs. Fogarty’s place I was feeling pretty normal again—puzzled, but normal. The rooming house was a two-story structure nailed together from rough-cut lumber. Brightly colored flower beds lined the walk and the generous porch with its heavy, overhanging roof. Baskets of flowers hung from the eaves. Mauve sandstone streaked black by water soared above it and arched over it. Beside the open front door was a sign that said simply, ‘Rooms.’

  As we entered through the front door we were greeted by a shriveled, silver-haired elf. “Mrs. Fogarty?” Steel inquired, a little shaken.

  “That’s me,” said the elf.

  Steel seemed taken aback by something, so I took over. “We’re going to be in town for a few days and were wondering if you had a couple of rooms.”

  “Two?”

  “That’s right. One for my wife and me and one for my sister-in-law and niece.”

  The elf looked around at the four of us. “Yes, we have rooms.”

  “How much are they?” I didn’t care, but it seemed like an Edenite would ask.

  “Two dollars a night. That includes breakfast and lunch. It’s fifty cents extra for sit-down dinner. Fresh bread every day. Still do all my own baking.”

  “That’s great,” I said. I was already looking forward to a meal. “We’ll take them.” I got out my wallet, did some quick arithmetic and handed her a twenty. “Here’s for four days in advance.”

  “All right. I’ll just need you to sign the guest book.” She took the bill and tottered back behind a small desk, turned the flat, open book to me and watched me sign. “Glad to have you here,” she read my writing, “Mr. and Mrs. McGavin. Do you plan to be staying on awhile?”

  “We’re not sure,” I answered. “We’re trying to find some relatives, if they still live here.”

  “Oh, that’s nice,” she said. She opened a drawer and took out a small, metal box, placing the bill I’d handed her on top of a stack of others. “Well, look at this!” she said at the sight of the bill. “It’s one of the old Gold Certificates! I haven’t seen one of these in years!”

  I looked at Steel. She started and said, “Oh, yes. Our, uh, our old Granny kept all our money on some old rafters in a barn. In—in the old shoebox, I mean, in the barn. She kept the shoebox on the rafter,” she faltered, “with the money in it ...” She looked for a way out of the improv. “She didn’t trust banks,” she finished.

  “Oh,” Mrs. Fogarty replied, blinking. She seemed to accept it, or decide it was none of her business. As she led us up a creaking staircase to our rooms I leaned over to Steel and whispered, “I liked my version better.” She elbowed me in the ribs.

  That night the nightmares started.

  Chapter 24

  If you want to learn about a culture, stay in a boarding house. What a collection of characters. We met Mrs. Fogarty’s daughter, Ruth Hudson, and her husband, Matthew Hudson. The last names confused me at first. I had assumed that Ruth’s last name would have been Fogarty, like her mother. Of course I hadn’t dealt with anyone who had more than one name in centuries, so I was rusty. I asked Archie about it and she muttered something about “capitalist patriarchy” and “inheritance.” I tried to remember if my wife had taken my last name when we got married, but I couldn’t remember what it had been. I must have lost it on some re-boot or other. It must not have seemed important to me at the time. I wondered if that would have upset my father.

  Ruth and Matthew looked about the same biological age as Steel, Arch and me, but they were shaped quite differently. I had forgotten human beings could take so many different shapes. Matthew was long and so thin as to be almost skeletal. Time or shyness or both had collapsed his posture into a triple ess-curve—he was preceded by his knees and Adam’s apple wherever he went. Ruth was a compact pile of a person: her plump head was piled on her plump neck and shoulders, her plump breasts were piled on her plump belly, which was piled on her plump hips, and the whole assembly sort of plumped around the room together, various parts oscillating in their own rhythms, her thick skirt sweeping the rugs on the foot-polished floor. It seemed there was nothing Matthew could say that Ruth couldn’t say better, or so she thought, so she usually did—in a voice that assumed volume made up for any other deficiencies. She seemed to be of the general opinion that her life was not all it might have been, largely because her husband wasn’t all that he should be. She ran the place while Matthew maintained it, but never to the level of proficiency Ruth expected or deserved. “Nails cost money!” was about the most supportive thing I ever heard her say to him.

  In fact, she was so unquestionably in charge of the whole operation that once I was moved to remark to Steel, “I thought you said this culture was male-dominated.”

  “It is. Why?”

  “Well, it seems to me like Ruth is telling Matthew where to go, what to do and how to do it.”

  “Oh,” she said. “Well—” and that was as far as she got: “Oh. Well–”

  Oh, well. Matthew didn’t seem to pay all that much attention to Ruth’s continued instruction, anyway. He pretty much did things the way he thought best, with Ruth looking over his shoulder, asking him why he was doing it this way and why didn’t he do it that way and how was she expected to keep the place open if he couldn’t take care of it any better than that?

  They were an interesting couple.

  Mrs. Fogarty, herself, (and this, I came to find out, is what had shocked Steel so when we first met her) consisted of what was left over after her DNA had finished with her. She must have been about five decades old when Steel and Co. had last been in Nazareth; she was well into her eighth decade now. The change in those three decades must have been profound. There was no fat left in her skin; it was dry and transparent. Her little, bent elfin body was carried on her pelvis like fruit in a basket, her twig legs stiff and bony. She held her blotched hands in front of her like she was praying all the time, and maybe she was. Her hands were the most painful part of her for me to watch: they looked crisp, like they’d been deep-fried. Arthritis had swollen her knuckles and bent her fingers into little paws; palsy made them shake. It was hard to imagine them as they must have once been: useful, dexterous tools capable of playing a musical instrument, drawing a picture, building a civilization. She didn’t seem to mind. She’d do what she could and let Ruth or Matthew do the rest.

  She tried to be the attenuator on Ruth’s exasperation, but her little, frail voice wasn’t up to the task. The three of them had achieved an odd, tripodal balance: the louder Ruth got, the quieter Matthew would get, and Mrs. Fogarty would flit back and forth between them, trying to grease the wheels.

  I suppose Mrs. Fogarty had a first name, but I never learned it. Ruth called her ‘mom,’ Matthew called her ‘mother,’ and everybody else just called her ‘Mrs. Fogarty.’ There
was a certain respect offered in the honorific; it would have seemed too familiar, somehow, to call her ‘Maggie’ or ‘Flo’ or whatever her name might have been.

  We met the other guests at dinner that night. (And what a dinner! The best fifty cents I ever spent.) There was Mr. Keebler: a quiet man with a fringe of hair around the sides of his head but none on top. He was a bachelor, and had lived at Mrs. Fogarty’s since moving to Nazareth from his parents’ house in New Jerusalem. He had a trade, bookkeeping, and was hoping to find a wife, so far without success. The Courtney sisters, Abigail and Patience, were hoping to find husbands, but there didn’t seem to be any electricity between them and Mr. Keebler. I got the idea that if there had been it would have broken a taboo—that if a courtship had started, either Mr. Keebler or the courted sister would have had to move to another house. Archie and Steel were right: sexuality was a closely and constantly monitored activity in this place.

  I was never entirely sure why the sisters lived with Mrs. Fogarty. I had the impression that most young women stayed with their parents until they were married. For some reason these two were out on their own. They had jobs in town to support themselves, but nothing they hoped to turn into careers. Women gained prestige and power on Eden by raising children.

  Then there was the Morgan family. Mr. Morgan (“Call me Samuel”) was a large man with large hands and a large, stern face carved by harsh sunlight and hard work. His wife, Theresa, was scrubbed and pink, and would have still been pretty if life on Eden hadn’t been so wearing. Her eyes and smile were still bright, but her face had been creased by the strain of bearing and raising her family, and she had quite a family. Michael was seventeen and earnest (“Hello, Mr. McGavin”), Rebecca was sixteen and flirtatious (“Pleased to meet you, Mr. McGavin”), Aaron and Elizabeth were fourteen and taciturn (“Say hello to Mr. and Mrs. McGavin. Aaron, Elizabeth, say hello.” “Hello.”), Esther was twelve and shy (“Hi”), and Isaac was nine and boisterous (“HI!”).

  Then there was “our little surprise package,” as Theresa put it, Sarah—tiny and wide-eyed and not yet two years old. Theresa managed this horde like a CEO runs a corporation: with motivational speeches and long-range strategies, bonuses, penalties and hard-ball negotiations.

  The emotional lives of the children fascinated me; they seemed to be constantly careening from ecstatic victories to bitter disappointments and back again. The tiniest things would send them dancing and shouting with unbounded elation or crashing down into heart-wrenching tears. It seemed to be Samuel’s job to install governors on these emotions; he was always admonishing the children to moderate them: “There, there, now, it’s nothing to cry about. Chin up. Be a man.” or “All right, all right, settle down. The river will still be there when we get there. Theresa, do you have everyone’s bathing suits?” Following an individual child’s path in the movement of the family was like watching a particular drop of water in a complex cascade—you knew all the drops would reach the bottom, but how they got there was always surprising and unique.

  Meals were served by Matthew and Ruth and presided over by Mrs. Fogarty. Conversation was allowed a fairly free range except for three topics: politics and religion were frowned upon (only as topics of dinner conversation, not as activities) and sexuality just never came up. Well, it wasn’t brought up by adults. One time Isaac asked what ‘jacking off’ meant (Archie told me later that it was an archaic expression for masturbation) and the reaction around the table was immediate and profound. It was as if a terrible pestilence had been spotted on the horizon and all able bodies were needed to stem the tide. Everything stopped while Samuel dealt with the situation:

  “Where did you hear that word?”

  Isaac squirmed. “I dunno.”

  “Where?”

  “I dunno, somebody said it. What’s wrong with it?”

  “That’s not the sort of language we use in polite society, and I’ll not hear you say it again.”

  “But what’s it mean?”

  “You don’t need to know what it means because you won’t be using it, will you?”

  Isaac looked darkly into his pudding with his chin in his palm.

  “Elbows off the table,” Theresa said gently. Isaac heaved a huge sigh of unendurable oppression and complied.

  Whenever either of the other two topics was strayed into, Mrs. Fogarty would guide us back away from the danger areas. It seemed that each meal would start as one big conversation, the women offering views based on their experience, feelings and impressions, the men occasionally inserting Solemn Pronouncements of Established Fact. These pronouncements would be considered in momentary silence and then the conversation would resume, largely ignoring whatever Established Fact had been brought up. After a few of these occurrences, the conversation would gradually split in two, the women discussing one topic, the men another.

  The structure of these conversations was very revealing. I don’t claim to have ever come to understand the culture of Eden, but my impression of it was that it was not so much male-dominated as it was sexist. Each of the genders seemed to regard the other as alien, incomprehensible, and incapable of understanding the utterly obvious. This mutual mistrust engendered a complex set of checks and balances on economic and political power. If men made most of the money, they were expected to spend most of it supporting women. Men who failed to do this were ostracized and shamed by everyone, men and women alike. Women, on the other hand, wielded a great deal of power within the home and were expected to use that power wisely for the benefit of the children in the home. This was the trump card. I saw Theresa play it more than once. A wife might disagree with something her husband wanted to do, and there was certainly friction while the difference of opinion was worked out, but if the wife could show that what she disagreed with was bad for the children, the husband would invariably acquiesce.

  If anything, Eden’s culture was child-dominated.

  We only spent meal and sleep times at Mrs. Fogarty’s, though. The rest of the time we spent searching for Alice’s parents. We couldn’t tell anyone they were her parents, however. Because of the time slippage on the voyage back from Brainard’s Planet, Alice was thirty years too young. We told everyone we were looking for her grandparents. The morning after our first night at Mrs. Fogarty’s (and my first nightmare) we went to the house where Alice grew up: no luck. We spoke with the people who lived there, but they had bought the place from someone else. They didn’t recognize Alice’s last name.

  That was another little shock: Alice had a last name. Her full name was Alice Louise Cheatham. It was a pretty name, but, I don’t know, it just felt strange to think that she had all those names. It seemed to connect her to all sorts of things: ancestors, traditions, social structures, belief systems. But anyway, the people who owned her house had purchased it from somebody named Harrison, so that was a dead end.

  We checked with the people who lived in the surrounding houses until we finally found someone who Steel and Archie recognized—they recognized his name, anyway, a Mr. Murray. I guess he’d changed as much as Mrs. Fogarty had. If they recognized him, he certainly didn’t recognize them. He was friendly enough, though, until we mentioned who we were looking for. At that point he clouded over and became reserved.

  “What do you want to dig that stuff up for?” he asked. I explained that Alice hadn’t ever met her grandparents. He grunted. “Didn’t know they had any grandchildren. You the son?”

  “No,” Steel answered for me. “The son, Jacob, died in an accident.”

  “Oh, that’s too bad.”

  “Do you know—” Steel started again, “Do you know where they went?”

  He shook his head. “It was a sad business. After the wife ran off everything sort of fell apart. How did you know them? That was a long time ago.”

  “We—we’ve been taking care of Alice since she was a, a baby.” Steel was working hard to conceal her emotions about something.

  “Hmm. So your name’s Alice, too, huh?” he asked Ali
ce.

  “Yeah.”

  “Alice was the daughter’s name, right?”

  Steel nodded. He asked Alice, “Was she your mom?”

  Alice glanced at Steel, then nodded.

  “What happened to her?”

  Archie stepped in. “We’re not sure. We’re just looking for her grandparents. Mr. and Mrs. Cheatham.”

  “Oh.” He eyed us all like he wasn’t sure he wanted to be involved with us, even tangentially, “Well, they probably have something about them down at the City Hall. That’s all I can tell you.”

  We thanked him and started to leave, but he said, “I don’t know that I’d go to too much trouble to find them.” We turned back. “They were heretics, you know. Never proved anything, but we all knew they were. Especially the wife.”

  We thanked him again and headed for Mrs. Fogarty’s. It had been a long day.

  The only time we could really talk to one another was in the evenings, in one of our rooms, with the door closed. The talks really helped me, because I was struggling trying to figure out how the place worked. Every time I turned around, something else strange and incomprehensible would confront me.

  “What did he mean, ‘heretics’?” I asked after we’d retired from another interesting dinner.

  “There’s only one heresy on Eden,” Archie replied. “Wanting to get back in touch with the outside world.”

  “Oh.”

  “I think they’ve institutionalized the taboo because the temptation is just too strong for individuals to deal with. Every time someone gets sick, or injured, or just old, the temptation is to think, ‘If only we could cure this one disease, save this one person.’ It’s really fascinating from an anthropological viewpoint. People rarely ask it for themselves.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “If a person is dying, he or she accepts it with surprising grace and dignity. It’s when a loved one is suffering or dying that the temptation to intervene comes up. But it really doesn’t come up that often. These people are pretty secure in their beliefs.”