“You put them at ease,” Beatrice said. “You’re there. You … well, you leave your scent around the house. You speak to them individually. Without knowing why, they no doubt find that very comforting. Don’t you, Alan?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I suppose I must have. From my first visit to the house, I knew I wanted to move in. And when I first saw Lynn, I …” He shook his head. “Funny, I thought all that was my idea.”
“Will you work with us, Alan?”
“Me? You want Lynn.”
“I want you both. You have no idea how many people take one look at one workroom here and turn and run. You may be the kind of young people who ought to eventually take charge of a place like Dilg.”
“Whether we want to or not, eh?” he said.
Frightened, I tried to take his hand, but he moved it away. “Alan, this works,” I said. “It’s only a stopgap, I know. Genetic engineering will probably give us the final answers, but for God’s sake, this is something we can do now!”
“It’s something you can do. Play queen bee in a retreat full of workers. I’ve never had any ambition to be a drone.”
“A physician isn’t likely to be a drone,” Beatrice said.
“Would you marry one of your patients?” he demanded. “That’s what Lynn would be doing if she married me—whether I become a doctor or not.”
She looked away from him, stared across the room. “My husband is here,” she said softly. “He’s been a patient here for almost a decade. What better place for him … when his time came?”
“Shit!” Alan muttered. He glanced at me. “Let’s get out of here!” He got up and strode across the room to the door, pulled at it, then realized it was locked. He turned to face Beatrice, his body language demanding she let him out. She went to him, took him by the shoulder, and turned him to face the door. “Try it once more,” she said quietly. “You can’t break it. Try.”
Surprisingly, some of the hostility seemed to go out of him. “This is one of those p.v. locks?” he asked.
“Yes.”
I set my teeth and looked away. Let her work. She knew how to use this thing she and I both had. And for the moment, she was on my side.
I heard him make some effort with the door. The door didn’t even rattle. Beatrice took his hand from it, and with her own hand flat against what appeared to be a large brass knob, she pushed the door open.
“The man who created that lock is nobody in particular,” she said. “He doesn’t have an unusually high I.Q., didn’t even finish college. But sometime in his life he read a science-fiction story in which palmprint locks were a given. He went that story one better by creating one that responded to voice or palm. It took him years, but we were able to give him those years. The people of Dilg are problem solvers, Alan. Think of the problems you could solve!”
He looked as though he were beginning to think, beginning to understand. “I don’t see how biological research can be done that way,” he said. “Not with everyone acting on his own, not even aware of other researchers and their work.”
“It is being done,” she said, “and not in isolation. Our retreat in Colorado specializes in it and has—just barely—enough trained, controlled DGDs to see that no one really works in isolation. Our patients can still read and write—those who haven’t damaged themselves too badly. They can take each other’s work into account if reports are made available to them. And they can read material that comes in from the outside. They’re working, Alan. The disease hasn’t stopped them, won’t stop them.” He stared at her, seemed to be caught by her intensity—or her scent. He spoke as though his words were a strain, as though they hurt his throat. “I won’t be a puppet. I won’t be controlled … by a goddamn smell!”
“Alan—”
“I won’t be what my mother is. I’d rather be dead!”
“There’s no reason for you to become what your mother is.”
He drew back in obvious disbelief.
“Your mother is brain damaged—thanks to the three months she spent in that custodial-care toilet. She had no speech at all when I met her. She’s improved more than you can imagine. None of that has to happen to you. Work with us, and we’ll see that none of it happens to you.”
He hesitated, seemed less sure of himself. Even that much flexibility in him was surprising. “I’ll be under your control or Lynn’s,” he said.
She shook her head. “Not even your mother is under my control. She’s aware of me. She’s able to take direction from me. She trusts me the way any blind person would trust her guide.”
“There’s more to it than that.”
“Not here. Not at any of our retreats.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“Then you don’t understand how much individuality our people retain. They know they need help, but they have minds of their own. If you want to see the abuse of power you’re worried about, go to a DGD ward.”
“You’re better than that, I admit. Hell is probably better than that. But …”
“But you don’t trust us.”
He shrugged.
“You do, you know.” She smiled. “You don’t want to, but you do. That’s what worries you, and it leaves you with work to do. Look into what I’ve said. See for yourself. We offer DGDs a chance to live and do whatever they decide is important to them. What do you have, what can you realistically hope for that’s better than that?”
Silence. “I don’t know what to think,” he said finally.
“Go home,” she said. “Decide what to think. It’s the most important decision you’ll ever make.”
He looked at me. I went to him, not sure how he’d react, not sure he’d want me no matter what he decided.
“What are you going to do?” he asked.
The question startled me. “You have a choice,” I said. “I don’t. If she’s right … how could I not wind up running a retreat?”
“Do you want to?”
I swallowed. I hadn’t really faced that question yet. Did I want to spend my life in something that was basically a refined DGD ward? “No!”
“But you will.”
“… Yes.” I thought for a moment, hunted for the right words. “You’d do it.”
“What?”
“If the pheromone were something only men had, you would do it.”
That silence again. After a time he took my hand, and we followed Beatrice out to the car. Before I could get in with him and our guard-escort, she caught my arm. I jerked away reflexively. By the time I caught myself, I had swung around as though I meant to hit her. Hell, I did mean to hit her, but I stopped myself in time. “Sorry,” I said with no attempt at sincerity.
She held out a card until I took it. “My private number,” she said. “Before seven or after nine, usually. You and I will communicate best by phone.”
I resisted the impulse to throw the card away. God, she brought out the child in me.
Inside the car, Alan said something to the guard. I couldn’t hear what it was, but the sound of his voice reminded me of him arguing with her—her logic and her scent. She had all but won him for me, and I couldn’t manage even token gratitude. I spoke to her, low voiced.
“He never really had a chance, did he?”
She looked surprised. “That’s up to you. You can keep him or drive him away. I assure you, you can drive him away.”
“How?”
“By imagining that he doesn’t have a chance.” She smiled faintly. “Phone me from your territory. We have a great deal to say to each other, and I’d rather we didn’t say it as enemies.”
She had lived with meeting people like me for decades. She had good control. I, on the other hand, was at the end of my control. All I could do was scramble into the car and floor my own phantom accelerator as the guard drove us to the gate. I couldn’t look back at her. Until we were well away from the house, until we’d left the guard at the gate and gone off the property, I couldn’t make myself look back. For lo
ng, irrational minutes, I was convinced that somehow if I turned, I would see myself standing there, gray and old, growing small in the distance, vanishing.
AUTHOR’S AFTERWORD
“The Evening and the Morning and the Night” grew from my ongoing fascinations with biology, medicine, and personal responsibility.
In particular, I began the story wondering how much of what we do is encouraged, discouraged, or otherwise guided by what we are genetically. This is one of my favorite questions, parent to several of my novels. It can be a dangerous question. All too often, when people ask it, they mean who has the biggest or the best or the most of whatever they see as desirable, or who has the smallest and the least of what is undesirable. Genetics as a board game, or worse, as an excuse for the social Darwinism that swings into popularity every few years. Nasty habit.
And yet the question itself is fascinating. And disease, grim as it is, is one way to explore answers. Genetic disorders in particular may teach us much about who and what we are.
I built Duryea-Gode disease from elements of three genetic disorders. The first is Huntington’s disease—hereditary, dominant, and thus an inevitability if one has the gene for it. And it is caused by only one abnormal gene. Also Huntington’s does not usually show itself until its sufferers are middle-aged.
In addition to Huntington’s, I used phenylketonuria (PKU), a recessive genetic disorder that causes severe mental impairment unless the infant who has it is put on a special diet.
Finally, I used Lesch-Nyhan disease, which causes both mental impairment and self-mutilation.
To elements of these disorders, I added my own particular twists: a sensitivity to pheromones and the sufferers’ persistent delusion that they are trapped, imprisoned within their own flesh, and that that flesh is somehow not truly part of them. In that last, I took an idea familiar to us all—present in many religions and philosophies—and carried it to a terrible extreme.
We carry as many as fifty thousand different genes in each of the nuclei of our billions of cells. If one gene among the fifty thousand, the Huntington’s gene, for instance, can so greatly change our lives—what we can do, what we can become—then what are we?
What, indeed?
For readers who find this question as fascinating as I do, I offer a brief, unconventional reading list: The Chimpanzees of Gombe: Patterns of Behavior by Jane Goodall, The Boy Who Couldn’t Stop Washing: The Experience and Treatment of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder by Judith L. Rapoport, Medical Detectives by Berton Roueché, An Anthropologist on Mars: Seven Paradoxical Tales and The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales by Oliver Sacks.
Enjoy!
ANNE RICHTER
The Sleep of Plants
TRANSLATED BY EDWARD GAUVIN
Anne Richter is a Belgian author, editor, and scholar. Her first collection, written at the age of fifteen, was translated as The Blue Dog by Alice B. Toklas, who praised her in the preface. In addition to her own fiction, she is known for editing an international anthology of female fantastical writers, Le fantastique féminin d’Ann Radcliffe à nos jours and writing essays about women writers and fantastical literature. In “The Sleep of Plants” a woman transforms into a plant in order to escape a humdrum, predictable life and seek the solitude she desires. It was first published in her collection Les locataires (The Tenants) in 1967.
“Slowing, we feel the pulse of things.” —Henri Michaux, “La Ralentie”
She lived like a plant. The rhythms of her life were more vegetable than human. She was prone, periodically, to sliding slowly into sleep; she remained inactive, immobile, hands crossed on knees, head tilted slightly toward one shoulder, staring straight ahead. Sometimes it was a tiny thing. A wearied bee gone astray in a fold of curtain, patiently, haltingly making the climb, stopping to gather its strength. The bee would hunch up briefly before setting out again; the young woman waited for the moment when the insect would fall, at once wishing for and fearing it, so much a part of the creature’s misery that her palms were moist. Or she would observe the exact whirl of dust motes in the light, between dresser and rug, finding secret calm in their constant movement. She followed water droplets gliding down gray panes, or would slip into one of her lengthy afflictions which never threatened her life, which she seemed to prolong for pleasure, from which she returned unhurriedly, eyes widened, a blue tinge to her skin, as if dazzled by the light upon leaving a cave.
She sank into utter solitude, surrounding herself with a rampart of silence. In these moments, her thoughts were vague, yet followed a precise path. With a spider’s patience, she forced herself from behind half-closed eyelids to catch, unawares, things as she felt they must be. This required total stillness, arduous efforts of concentration. Meticulously, she repeated everyday words until they lost their usual meaning. Spoon, spoon, she would say, softly and stubbornly. She would polish the word, handling it almost absent-mindedly, yet taking care to treat it as respectfully as she could, never to consider it and see only usefulness. Little by little, it lost all consistency. Then began the meticulous work of a watchmaker. She persisted cautiously, decanted it, slowly breathed new life into the word. Sometimes she saw it come round, get back on its feet; then she would discover an entirely new meaning. She called this undressing words.
One day, she got engaged. Her fiancé was a likable young man. Sundays they often went for walks in the countryside. They trod carefully, hand in hand, along meadows and hedges. They spoke of this and that, without passion or impatience. One morning, George wanted to show her a place he’d found. They packed a lunch and set out. It was unusually warm. All the trees were in bloom, and the grass was tall in the fields. “There it is!” cried George. “Let’s run for it!” They both broke into a sprint, and the young woman flew through the grass, laughing and waving her arms, displaying an unusual vitality. She reached the first trunk, and threw her arms around it; her fiancé caught up and kissed her on the mouth. The woods before them were split between sunlight and shadow. But suddenly she felt faint, and her hands gripped the bark. The young man was worried, surprised.
“Oh, it’s nothing,” she said.
She sat down in the grass and leaned her head against the trunk. Then she went pale, smoothed her dress, and glanced anxiously at her fiancé.
“What a pretty place!” she said.
But le déjeuner sur l’herbe was ruined.
They stopped going for walks. Her fiancé tried to drag her along, but she stubbornly refused, pleading fatigue. Around this time, she did in fact suffer from inexplicable spells of weariness. She was sorry, in all her immobility, that she couldn’t sink roots. Bore into the ground for good, surround herself with a quiet cloud of light like those around pines or over certain shrubs in summer. But she had to get up from her chair, go here, go there. She did violence to herself speaking, moving, and afterwards fell back trembling, mouth dry, dying of thirst like a plant denied water.
The activity around her seemed less comprehensible than ever: needless commotion, futile chaos. And yet the regular course of daily affairs troubled her. She furled her leaves, lived on nothing. She was like a cactus, skin tender behind protecting needles, needing little water and light to live.
She saw that, by dint of stillness and withdrawal, you felt yourself become the center of the world, the source of its movement. As a child, she’d played at becoming the center of the world, an extraordinary game she never tired of—secretly aware, perhaps, of its gravity and power. She would walk backward, head thrown back and gazing at the sky until she grew dizzy. That was what she wanted, for dizziness to make her see things differently, herself frozen and the earth yawing, the sun and the clouds whirling about. Or else, sitting in a moving train, feeling the coarseness of the seat cushion beneath her palms, aware of the cadenced pace of travel in every part of her body, the train car stinking of cold ash, wet clothes, and smoke, she would scrutinize the white square of window, and suddenly the world would begin to change. The tra
in had stopped, in the corner of her window she’d watch all the people walking, the meadows leaping past, the fleeing sky, slashed in its flight by taut telephone wires.
This state of grace almost always ended soon. The world grew still again, and her train car clattered along God knew where. Bitterness flooded her; disgust. She believed herself the only living person in a dead world shaken by sound and fury, till the day she understood: in motionlessness, movement found its source. She decided to fall silent, and in silence, animate the world.
This is what she did: she found a giant stoneware pot, a great bag of humus. She stepped into the basin, covered her legs in a blanket of earth. She vanished up to her hips. How good it felt! Never had she known such ecstasy. She was back in her element. From the depths of herself rose a silence. Still, a certain nervousness persisted, a tingle at the end of her fingers, toes, like expectation. I’ll get used to it, she thought, wiggling her toes.
But there was a knock at the door; what would she tell her mother? The door opened and their eyes met. What grief in her mother’s gaze!
“I always expected the worst from you, but not this—not this!”
“Look, I’ve always given in, but this time, your tears are wasted!”
In fact, things stayed much the same. After the initial shock, the usual routine set in. She’d never taken up much space in family life. From now on, she took up none at all. An empty chair at dinner was pushed to a corner. A vacant bed was moved to the attic. Clothes were given to the poor. Not once did her mother lift her gaze to the heavy basin upstairs. She vacuumed around it, cleaned the rug without comment, dusted quickly, her face expressionless. Maybe she hoped, by denying her daughter light, to see her wither and die. But plants are hardy. They have all the time in the world, and a gift for frugality.
When her fiancé came to see her, he didn’t know what to say. He raised the blinds. She looked pale, her eyes ringed. Her arms hung slack at her sides like dead branches; her neck bowed beneath the moss of her hair. She gazed at him, not without a certain annoyance in her eyes: had his movements always been so brusque? She couldn’t recall suffering from them before.
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