Orbit 11 - [Anthology]

by Edited by Damon Night

  I hurried up the dingy marble stairs, thinking, don’t those street cleaners ever? then stopped, realizing that the grubbiness of the building was a psychological ploy. Dirt meant age, and age was permanence. Security, catch?

  I opened the door, noticing a garish sticker sloppily plastered across the shatterproof glass: Helen Keller Died for Your Sins.

  A bit hysterical, perhaps, but significant. I went inside.

  The vestibule was deathly still, an unnerving reminder of the anechoic chamber I had been confined to for the few weeks following my last crack-up. I do cope, but then we all have our own ways. I can stay relatively stable for moderately long stretches, but eventually I end up in a chamber. So that’s my vice. I’m used to it now, although I envy those people who can get by with nothing more than sunglasses or insulated gloves.

  Sharon stood across the foyer under a day-glo “QUIET’ sign. She wasn’t pretty—too much face and a chin that jutted out like one of those nut scoops used by the blind peanut vendors on Montessori Avenue. Her hips were full, her legs too fat. She was dressed in a voluminous jumpsuit that challenged the legal limit—a bright, shocking magenta. But after all, that was Sharon.

  And she was crying.

  “Sherry—” I said. She turned to me, all tears, those familiar fool’s-gold eyes red-rimmed with pain. “They fired me,” she said, pulling a tissue out of the old gasmask bag she used for a purse.

  “What—?”

  “They said I couldn’t pace myself with the students, that I was going too fast, God knows that I tried—” She was shaking uncontrollably. I knew it was more than the job. “I don’t know why it should bother me, really. I’m just a selfish bitch anyway. I was only in it for the money.”

  “It wasn’t that way, Sherry.” (A sudden twinge of doubt, about Sherry, myself, our relationship. But no. Sharon was just a talented, down-and-out girl doing her best to help those poor bastards who had no other escape than to put out their eyes, plug their ears. But what could you expect from a society so flooded with sensory and informational input, so paranoid that it was necessary to have a “QUIET” sign in a clinic for the deaf?)

  * * * *

  The first time I saw Sherry, she was yelling at the top of her lungs. A fish-faced sea of flesh stared back. “Make noise!” she screamed, “Laugh, cry, anything! I can’t do it alone!”

  It was an art exhibit, Sherry’s first—an entire room sensitive to body heat, noise, alpha waves. “Scream, you idiots!”

  “Let’s go, Greg,” said the petite girl at my side. She clutched my hand. “I don’t like this.”

  I paid her no attention; I was much too fascinated by the charismatic young woman at the center of the gallery. Impulsively, I yelled out something, anything, it didn’t matter what.

  Sherry’s eyes flashed at me for the first time as the room came to glowing life. I yelled again, and Sherry yelled back, all in front of a skyburst cyclorama of color and sound. The girl at my side faded away, with the others, and later, after love with Sherry, there was only blue susurrating equilibrium.

  “They’re closing the exhibit tomorrow,” she said matter-of-factly. “A public nuisance, they say. Some old woman tried suing the gallery—she said it aggravated her neurasthenia.”

  “What will you do now?”

  “Something. Something exciting and challenging.” She laughed.

  Some of us felt responsibility—others, like Sherry and myself, thrived on the very madness of our overloaded, crumbling world. We were quicker, smarter—she as an artist and I as a news “editor.” We could cope.

  “That girl,” Sharon asked me once. “Why did you drop her?”

  “She bored me.”

  “Is that all?”

  “Well, if you must know, she was a slug. A leech. She held me down and she knew it was coming anyway.”

  * * * *

  Sunlight streamed down in diagonal streaks across the acoustic mall. People walked barefoot; others had inch-thick soles of foam rubber on their canvas sandals. The streets were filled with silent bicyclers.

  We walked quietly down the Boulevard for a block. Sherry was still shivering. I didn’t notice as she stepped off the curb against the “DON’T WALK” sign. A woman in horseblinders on a Schwinn Deluxe veered in her direction, and there was the heart-stopping, rocket-sled shriek of rubber on road as her bike skidded to a perpendicular halt. “Damn you!” screamed Sharon in a voice I had never heard before.

  The air froze as a hundred pairs of eyes flashed in our direction. Hidden eyes. Frightened eyes of the people with static-charged clothing that would jolt you at the slightest touch.

  The woman with the blinders threw her arms around her head and sobbed pitifully, her parcels of gimcracks and toiletries strewn across the pavement like broken toys.

  A cop came, looking like a deep-sea diver in his padded, pressurized uniform, faceless behind a mask of gradient density glass. I felt a vague, swelling anger at the blatant impersonality of his costume, although I knew the reasons for the heavily insulated suit. Day-to-day existence was difficult enough without the added sensory bombardment a law officer would have to undergo.

  “What’s the trouble here?” he asked, the filtered voice sounding like a long-distance phone call.

  “Look,” I said quietly, producing my press credentials. “This young lady just lost her job and she’s very upset. If you’d just let me—”

  “You realize that this kind of disturbance is a serious misdemeanor, punishable by law?”

  Sharon nodded, shaking, sobbing, not looking at the cop. A crowd had gathered to console the other sobbing woman with soft words and sign language.

  The cop shifted nervously, then started waving the crowd back with his anesthetic billy. Then, to Sharon: “Are you on medication?”

  “Yes.”

  My stomach turned into a knot.

  “Listen,” said the cop in an electronic sotto voce. “I’ll let you go this time.” To me: “Watch her.”Click. Over and out.

  “Bitch’“ hissed the woman in the horseblinders before she was lost in the crowd.

  * * * *

  The subsonic relaxamusic thrummed throughout the little restaurant, like low-key bat radar.

  “So you’re taking the Cure?”

  Yes again.

  “How long?”

  “Six months. I would have told you earlier only I was afraid that—”

  She was starting up again. I leaned over the counter, whispered. “For God’s sake, Sherry, calm down!”

  The waitress brought our coffee, placing the soft squeeze tubes on the padded table with robotlike precision. She was blind. I looked away.

  “Energizers,” she went on. “They started with B-12, adrenalin.” She started to cry again, but not about the job or the accident.

  “But, God, Sherry—wasn’t there any other way? You could have spent a year on one of those farms, relaxed—”

  She laughed, almost hysterically. “Relaxation? Is that what you call it? I need activity. I’m an artist—at least I was. Those farms would be stagnant hell for me! Don’t you understand?”

  I understood. I should have known before; the symptoms were all there. The books, piled high in her soundproof apartment. Three, four a night. “Speed reading,” she called it. Her increased sexual demands. It was all there.

  She sipped her black coffee. Caffeine. The tip of the metabolic iceberg. I should have known.

  “It’s not like I’m dying or anything,” she said. “It’s not like I won’t have a full life.”

  Full to her, perhaps, rewarding in its richness and productive complexity. But what about me? I knew what would happen next—she’d stay on a little longer, but as the therapy began taking hold, she would become a frenetic gibbering thing to me, I a sluggish animal to her. Finally she would go off to a colony of her own kind, speaking their language of clicks and whirs, ultimately learning to hate the slow, static, paralyzed world outside. And in ten short years—

  Alre
ady she was more animated. Already the injections were taking effect, and it was with effort that she spoke, with forced distinctness and painful clarity.

  “Come on,” she said.

  We tried to make love in my apartment, but it ended in tears. One of her heavy thighs rested across my body, and she nestled her head under my chin. I ran my fingers through her sandy-blond hair, noting the room, the particular aroma of scented candles and incense, freshly made love and Sherry. The room was very quiet. Sharon’s eyes, gold-flecked and desperate.

  “You won’t leave me,” she pleaded. A petite girl long ago, holding my hand at an art show, terrified—

  “No,” I said.

  But after that, things went pretty quickly.

  <>

  * * * *

  Joe W. Haldeman

  COUNTERPOINT

  Michael Tobias Kidd was born in New Rochelle, N.Y., at exactly 8:03:47 on 12 April 1943. His birth was made as easy as the birth of a millionaire’s son can be.

  Roger William Wellings was born in New Orleans, La., at exactly 8:03:47 on 12 April 1943. His prostitute mother died in giving birth, and his father could have been any one of an indeterminate number of businessmen she had serviced seven months before at a war materiel planning convention.

  Michael’s mother considered herself progressive. She alternated breast-feeding with a sterilized bottle of scientifically prepared formula. An army of servants cared for the mansion while she lavished time and affection on her only son.

  Roger’s wet nurse, a black woman hired by the orphanage, despised the spindly pink premature baby and hoped he would die. Somehow, he lived.

  Both babies were weaned on the same day. Michael had steak and fresh vegetables laboriously minced and mortared and pestled by a skilled dietician on the kitchen staff. Roger had wartime Gerber’s, purchased by the orphanage in gallon jars that were left open far too long.

  In a sunny nursery on that glorious morning of 16 March 1944, Michael said “Mama,” his first word. It was raining in New Orleans, and unseasonably cold, and that word was one that Roger wouldn’t learn for some time. But at the same instant, he opened his mouth and said “No” to a spoonful of mashed carrots. The attendant didn’t know it was Roger’s first word, but was not disposed to coax, and Roger went hungry for the rest of the morning.

  And the war ground on. Poor Michael had to be without his father for weeks at a time, when he journeyed to Washington or San Francisco or even New Orleans to confer with other powerful men. In these times, Mrs. Kidd redoubled her affection and tried to perk up the little tyke with gifts of toys and candy. He loved his father and missed him, but shrewdly learned to take advantage of his absences.

  The orphanage in New Orleans lost men to the armed forces and the stronger women went out to rivet and weld and slap grey paint for the war. Roger’s family winnowed down to a handful of old ladies and bitter 4-F’s. Children would die every month from carelessness or simple lack of attention. They would soil their diapers and lie in the mess for most of the day. They would taste turpentine or rat poison and try to cope with the situation without benefit of adult supervision. Roger lived, though he didn’t thrive.

  The boys were two years old when Japan capitulated. Michael sat at a garden party in New Rochelle and watched his parents and their friends drink champagne and kiss and laugh and wipe each other’s tears away. Roger was kept awake all night by the drunken brawl in the next room, and twice watched with childish curiosity as white-clad couples lurched into the ward and screwed clumsily beside his crib.

  September after Michael’s fourth birthday, his mother tearfully left him in the company of ten other children and a professionally kind lady, to spend half of each day coping with the intricacies of graham crackers and milk, crayons and fingerpaints. His father had a cork board installed in his den, where he thumbtacked Michael’s latest creations. Mr. Kidd’s friends often commented on how advanced the youngster was.

  The orphanage celebrated Roger’s fourth birthday the way they celebrated everybody’s. They put him to work. Every morning after breakfast he went to the kitchen, where the cook would give him a paper bag full of potatoes and a potato peeler. He would take the potatoes out of the bag and peel them one by one, very carefully making the peelings drop into the bag. Then he would take the bag of peelings down to the incinerator, where the colored janitor would thank him for it very gravely. Then he would return to wash the potatoes after he had scrubbed his own hands. This would take most of the morning—he soon learned that haste led only to cut fingers, and if there was the slightest spot on one potato, the cook would make him go over all of them once again.

  Nursery school prepared Michael quite well for grade school, and he excelled in every subject except arithmetic. Mr. Kidd hired a succession of tutors who managed through wheedling and cajoling and sheer repetition to teach Michael first addition, then subtraction, then multiplication, and finally long division and fractions. When he entered high school, Michael was actually better prepared in mathematics than most of his classmates. But he didn’t understand it, really—the tutors had given him a superficial facility with numbers that, it was hoped, might carry him through.

  Roger attended the orphanage grade school, where he did poorly in almost every subject. Except mathematics. The one teacher who knew the term thought that perhaps Roger was an idiot savant (but he was wrong). In the second grade, he could add up a column of figures in seconds, without using a pencil. In the third grade, he could multiply large numbers by looking at them. In the fourth grade, he discovered prime numbers independently and could crank out long division orally, without seeing the numbers. In the fifth grade someone told him what square roots were, and he extended the concept to cube roots, and could calculate either without recourse to pencil and paper. By the time he got to junior high school, he had mastered high school algebra and geometry. And he was hungry for more.

  Now this was 1955, and the boys were starting to take on the appearances that they would carry through adult life. Michael was the image of his father; tall, slim, with a slightly arrogant, imperial cast to his features. Roger looked like one of nature’s lesser efforts. He was short and swarthy, favoring his mother, with a potbelly from living on starch all his life, a permanently broken nose, and one ear larger than the other. He didn’t resemble his father at all.

  Michael’s first experience with a girl came when he was twelve. His riding teacher, a lovely wench of eighteen, supplied Michael with a condom and instructed him in its use, in a pile of hay behind the stables, on a lovely May afternoon.

  On that same afternoon, Roger was dispassionately fellating a mathematics teacher only slightly uglier than he was, this being the unspoken price for tutelage into the mysteries of integral calculus. The experience didn’t particularly upset Roger. Growing up in an orphanage, he had already experienced a greater variety of sexual adventure than Michael would in his entire life.

  In high school, Michael was elected president of his class for two years running. A plain girl did his algebra homework for him and patiently explained the subject well enough for him to pass the tests. In spite of his mediocre performance in that subject, Michael graduated with honors and was accepted by Harvard.

  Roger spent high school indulging his love for mathematics, just doing enough work in the other subjects to avoid the boredom of repeating them. He applied to several colleges, just to get the counselor off his back, but in spite of his perfect score on the College Boards (Mathematics), none of the schools had an opening. He apprenticed himself to an accountant and was quite happy to spend his days manipulating figures with half his mind, while the other half worked on a theory of Abelian groups that he was sure would one day blow modern algebra wide open.

  Michael found Harvard challenging at first, but soon was anxious to get out into the “real world”—helping Mr. Kidd manage the family’s widespread, subtle investments. He graduated cum laude, but declined graduate work in favor of becoming a junior
financial adviser to his father.

  Roger worked away at his books and at his theory, which he eventually had published in the SIAM Journal by the simple expedient of adding a Ph.D. to his name. He was found out, but he didn’t care.

  At Harvard, Michael had taken ROTC and graduated with a Reserve commission in the infantry, at his father’s behest. There was a war going on now, in Vietnam, and his father, perhaps suffering a little from guilt at being too young for the first World War and too old for the second, urged his son to help out with the third.

  Roger had applied for OCS at the age of twenty, and had been turned down (he never learned it was for “extreme ugliness of face”). At twenty-two, he was drafted; and the Army, showing rare insight, took notice of his phenomenal ability with numbers and sent him to artillery school. There he learned to translate cryptic commands like “Drop 50” and “Add 50” into exercises in analytic geometry that eventually led to a shell being dropped exactly where the forward observer wanted it. He loved to juggle the numbers and shout orders to the gun crew, who were in turn appreciative of his ability, as it lessened the amount of work for them—Roger never had a near miss that had to be repeated. Who cares if he looks like the devil’s brother-in-law? He’s a good man to have on the horn.