The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Third Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  He watched his hair grow back. They had shaved his head to clamp his skull in something akin to medieval ice tongs, keeping him immobile after miracle surgery that had failed to produce any miracle at all. By then he was bargaining for even semi-miracles—“Let me move my fingers,” he thought. He prayed for inches of healing. But the doctors had been blunt with him. Nerves would not regenerate. What was severed was disconnected for good. No long distance calls to the toes. No forwarding address. No telegrams from the groin. He was aware that some bodily functions went on without him, without so much as his permission or a nod. If a dark stain appeared around the crotch of his blue pajamas then he knew the plumbing had sprung a leak. Somebody took care of it. Somebody took care of everying—from brushing his teeth to turning him over in bed.

  He watched the hole in his throat close where the tracheotomy had been. It left a deep hollow but all his vanity had long since evaporated, along with modesty, mortification, and muscle tone. His body, at the time of the accident, had been in peek condition from jogging on the beach and carefully calculated weight lifting. He was sculpting himself for Jenny. Had been. Now, if one wanted to be poetic about it, he thought, his body was Christlike, post-crucifixion, pre-resurrection. He even looked rather biblical, letting his dark hair and beard grow. Being shaved by impatient attendants on the spinal injury ward was a frill Cody easily gave up. He felt guilty taking up their time. Most of the quadriplegics, or quads as they called themselves, grew beards. It was just easier. The place was understaffed as it was. And the ward was filled, due to the advancement of medical technology. Now broken necks weren’t automatic death sentences. Just life sentences, Cody thought, watching bodies move, wedded to wheels forevers for any semblance of mobility.

  Paraplegics, sneeringly called “pares” by the quads, garnered not an ounce of sympathy on the ward. Most pares soon learned to temper their self-pity and helped out, feeding quads meals, fetching things, even emptying filled urine bags. Quads learned not to want things. There were too few hands to respond to their wants anyway. Cody learned to stare at flipping TV images, to lie silently in his own excrement until someone could get around to him, to wait until he could catch a visitor before asking for the magazine that had slid off the bed and onto the floor.

  Such was life on the ward. Progress was measured in how many minutes he could sit up in a wheelchair before becoming faint. He watched his fingernails grow. Odd little ridges had appeared at the cuticle of each nail and they moved forward as time passed. They reminded Cody of tree rings, telling of drought years. Something had interrupted the body, a trauma before return to normalcy. Well, yes, thought Cody, a broken neck was slightly traumatic. And not a single thing in his life would ever be normal again. Even nail cutting felt funny. It almost nauseated him. The sensation was distorted somehow, as if an echo of feeling had, by the time it got to his brain, become a convoluted nightmare. He could see the nurse working gently with nail clippers, but it felt as if she were cutting off his fingers. There was a lot of that, a lot of the “phantom limb” syndrome, a Daliesque canvas of body signals, S.O.S. messages spilling out of broken wires. What got through was something he would rather not have received. Ghosts he could do without.

  After a year of learning to redefine himself in terms unique to those with spinal injuries, Cody left the medical sanctuary. He had been out on short excursions before, but always with other pares and quads. For a year he had been one of the wheeled majority. Now he was a specific minority in a walking world. And he didn’t like it. He moved into a group home in Long Beach where several wheelchaired vets had set up housekeeping. Mac helped him get settled and then hung around, awkward, not knowing how to leave gracefully. He stayed for supper. Cody wished he hadn’t, for he was still learning to manipulate the swivel spoon gadget in the hand brace, and self-feeding was still a messy business. His range of movement was limited to shoulders and upper arms, and fine-motor coordination was a skill he was still working on.

  “You don’t have to stick around,” Cody said later as they sat in his room, Mac perched on his hospital bed because there was no place else to sit.

  “You want me to go?”

  “Yeah, I want you to go.”

  “I guess you’re kinda tired—from the move and all … I’ll be back in the morning to unpack your stuff—”

  “No.”

  “I mean, to sort of get you settled—”

  “Adam can do it.” Adam was the live-in aide who ran the house and cooked the meals. He was black and well-muscled and used to lifting a man onto a bed, into a tub, off of a toilet.

  “I can do it,” Mac argued. “I don’t mind doing it. I can take off work. It doesn’t matter. I want to do it.”

  “I don’t want you … around, okay?” Cody knew how it sounded, but he didn’t care. Mac had slunk in and out of the hospital, guilty for walking, apologetic for his wholeness. Cody couldn’t stand looking at him. The spidery red scar on his face just made Cody want to hate him and he didn’t want to start abusing the last friend he had. Better to cut him free and be done with it.

  “Don’t … come around anymore,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Just get out of my life, Mac. You don’t owe me. You’re not responsible. I absolve you of all blame. Okay?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  Cody waited for a leg spasm to stop. “I’m tired of your doing time at my expense. You’re part of Before. You don’t belong here, in my world anymore. And this is my world. You don’t fit in. You’re not wanted. How else you want me to say it?”

  Mac studied his hands. “I don’t know how to help. I don’t know what to do.”

  “There’s nothing you can do. I don’t want your pain anymore, Mac. Just … go away.”

  And he did. Cody got a few phone calls from him at first—strained small talk. There wasn’t much use in either one asking how things were going. They had nothing new in common and the past was something Cody didn’t want to think about. The phone calls tapered off to occasional letters, then post cards, then nothing.

  Time passed. Cody measured his progress in small triumphs of independence—learning how to empty the urine bag strapped to his right leg, doing his own bowel care, learning to open his own mail when there was any, mostly from his mother in Texas. His father was dead. Jenny’s letters were returned unopened until they stopped coming. His mother sent him a clipping out of the local paper about the engagement. Jenny still looked pretty, he thought, and he knew he had done the right thing, closing that door. His mother had always been a clipping sender, but now he wished she would stop. He didn’t care to hear what his old school buddies were doing these days. They weren’t running in the same league, so to speak. He had endured one long tearful visit from his mother while he was still in the VA hospital and he could do without any more of those, too. He’d chosen to settle in California. At least there he was familiar with the nurses and a lot of the faces he’d come to know since entering his new world. California made space for “his kind,” he thought. Building laws had been passed that helped make minor matters a bit more convenient, like drinking fountains he could reach, and more curbs with ramps he could use in his electric wheelchair. And too, California weather suited him. To survive Texas summers one needed to be able to sweat and that was something else his body no longer could do.

  He started having preferences again. He learned to eat in public, ignoring stares. He decided to go to school. Mostly, however, he listened, and watched, and read. And thought. To escape. He got good at escaping. He could sit in the sun out on the patio and Go Away. That’s what he called for lack of a better term. He wasn’t sure exactly where it was he went, but it felt good, and he didn’t like coming back.

  It was in his second semester at the local community college that he fitted a pencil into his hand brace and started doodling. He had rather enjoyed drawing in high school, but this was his first attempt at it since the accident. He drew a naked women with fantasy brea
sts. He liked it. He drew faces. Then went back to bodies. He liked bodies. Female bodies specifically. Sketching wasn’t easy. He had to tell shoulder and arms muscles how to compensate for fingers that could no longer so much as pick his nose. Shading was hard because he couldn’t feel how much pressure he was putting on the pencil point except by looking.

  Bushnell, Fielding, and Sharkey, the three other quads in the house, admired his work. They asked him to draw them some female bodies with fantasy breasts, too. Some preferred bigger fantasies than others. Sharkey wanted his fantasy in chains. He was into chains. He had been into motorcycles before he broke his neck running his Harley into a truck. Now, mostly he was into beer—and chains. Cody couldn’t understand why Sharkey preferred his fantasy women bound until he began taking psychology courses. Then he still wasn’t sure.

  He began to think of life in terms of semesters. He chose courses because they mildly appealed to him, not because he had any particular goals in mind. He was one hundred percent disabled, according to his medical records. If he fell out of his chair he would have to lie there until somebody rescued him. Uncle Sam sheltered him somewhat financially, since he had given the bloom of his youth to scraping paint off of battleships down in San Diego. It was lucky he had gotten his yen for traveling out of his system, he thought. He had seen the world, at least most of the seaports of the world, but as Sharkey had said, that was a little like judging a woman only by her fanny. You couldn’t judge the whole world by its sea. You had to go inland to get perspective.

  Cody began to notice that his semesters gravitated toward the arts. He had tried a geology course but the field trip was out of the question. He’d had to do a term paper instead and he hated typing—one letter at a time with a typing stick on an electric typewriter. Art was better.

  He bought a drafting table and his art supplies started looking professional. He had a mulitude of pencils and knew how to use them with finely honed expertise.

  Seasons passed with a kind of sameness, but Cody finally had a passion—his art. Sharkey would sit and watch him draw, opening flip-top beer cans with his teeth until he passed out, sliding out of his chair and onto the floor if his seat belt wasn’t fastened. Adam would hoist the man over his shoulder and carry him off to bed.

  “He needs a woman,” Adam said, “but he ain’t got a mind big enough. You got a mind big enough,” he said to Cody.

  Cody understood what he meant. His inner landscapes were busy. And his woman didn’t have chains. There were a few real ones who talked to him on campus, and called him once in a while, but Cody let it go at that. There were phone numbers, passed from quad to pare, for women with special qualities, and there had been times he had used the numbers. But his inner universe was infinitely more appealing. The art consumed him. He would surface from hours of deep concentration on a piece of work and know only that he had been content for a little while.

  Besides beer and bondage, Sharkey’s other main occupation was as a volunteer guinea pig for a medical research laboratory in L.A. Bushnell, who got his diving into a sunken log while on leave, and Fielding, another van roll, both looked upon Sharkey as a madman.

  “I got no government sugar daddy,” Sharkey belched, blowing a long strand of copper hair off of his nose. They were sitting around watching a Lakers game on TV and Adam was filling out forms that Sharkey would need for the next project.

  “I still say you’re fuckin’ nuts,” Bushnell said. “You don’t even know what they’re going to do, and you’re signing your name on the dotted line.”

  “Did you read that fine print?” Fielding asked.

  “It don’t matter,” Sharkey smiled. “What the hell can they do to me? It’s all been done, right? Ain’t nothin’ else they can do to make it any worse. Sure can’t hurt.” He laughed at his own joke. Sharkey had burned his left calf badly the previous winter when he leaned his leg against a wall heater in the bathroom. His first hint that all was not well was the smell of scorched flesh. The result was a curiously graceful brand in the shape of a spiral, for that had been the design on the heater grillwork. Since his arms were already well-tattooed, he was considering ways to brand his right calf with a skull and crossbones before the others talked him out of it. Pain was only a memory. From the neck down anyway.

  Cody pulled a No. 2H pencil out of his hand brace with his teeth and inserted a No. 6B. He was working on a large portrait of Stravinsky, using a small black and white photo as a guide. One of the students in his music theory class had commissioned the work and he was pleased with the way it was turning out. Sharkey had been disappointed. He quickly lost interest if Cody’s subject was not female, preferably nude and taut in all the right places.

  “What’s the name of this project?” Cody asked. Sharkey’s last experimental undertaking was called PROJECT IRON-FLEX. It had involved intricately-geared hand and finger braces. His left arm—for he had been lefthanded prior to the smash-up—was encased in something that looked like chromed armor. It was designed to create movement through carefully flexed shoulder muscles. It had worked a little too well. Beer cans, once clutched, were crushed before Sharkey could get them to his lips. One night in a bar he had pinched a girl’s bottom and almost caused a riot because the bottom was property claimed by a member of a motocycle gang. The man had bristled and slung a few epithets at Sharkey who in turn flexed a muscle that raised his middle finger. Later, in the hospital, he said, “I never thought he’d hit a guy in a wheelchair, man.” PROJECT IRON-FLEX was scrapped soon after. Cody thought it was just as well. He had an aversion to metal gadgets. He was melded to mechanical devices too much as it was. Watching Sharkey in his hardware reminded him of the artist H.R. Giger’s biomechanoids, nightmares that were half human, half metallic torture machines. He could never have become a beneficiary of PROJECT IRON-FLEX.

  Sharkey cruised over to Cody’s drafting table to check on the drawing.

  “When are you gonna get back to tits?”

  “Soon. So what’s the name of the new project?” Cody asked again.

  “R.A.B.B.”

  Fielding, in the kitchen getting another beer, laughed. “Rab? Like in Rabbit Test? Hey, Bushnell,” he hooted, “they’re gonna kill Sharkey to find out if some lady’s pregnant.”

  “R-A-B-B,” Sharkey spelled.

  “What’s it mean?” Bushnell asked, rolling over. He preferred using a manual chair for the arm exercise. He was impressive for a quad, Cody thought. Bushnell could lift his butt off his chair with his arms for minutes at a time. It helped keep his skin from breaking down. Decubitus ulcers from lack of circulation were a constant worry. Cody had a terrible time with pressure sores and he envied Bushnell’s agility.

  “I don’t remember what it means,” Sharkey muttered. “It don’t matter what it means. I can’t talk about it. It’s top secret.

  “A regular threat to national security, huh?” said Bushnell. “God forbid the Russians get quads on their feet before we do. Come on, what’s R.A.B.B. mean?”

  “Rockabye Baby,” Adam read, holding up one of Sharkey’s forms.

  “Hey, that’s secret, man!” Sharkey yelled, zipping over to snatch the document away from the aide.

  “I knew it was a rabbit test,” Fielding said. “Shark, they’re gonna cut you open and—”

  “No, they’re not!”

  “Told you to read the fine print, didn’t I? Sucker.”

  “It’s somethin’ else. No cuttin’. I’m done with cuttin’.” Sharkey had reluctantly agreed a year earlier to have the tendons in his legs cut to try to subdue violent leg spasms. The decision had somehow also severed his last hope of any miracle recovery. It was soon after that that he had turned his body over to the researchers.

  On Monday a blue van with a hydraulic lift in back came to collect Sharkey, wheelchair and all. He waved goodbye to everyone on the porch as if he were headed for a trip to Disneyland.

  “See you turkeys Friday,” he said as the lift clanged shut behind him. Cody felt a f
licker of nausea. He was reminded of cages. Traps and cages.

  Adam picked up the morning paper from the lawn after the van had departed. “I’m not cooking nothing extra on Friday ’til I see his face, I can tell you that. First legal-type paper I ever seen that laid out funeral arrangements, in case.”

  Fielding and Bushnell looked at each other. “I told him he should have read the fine print,” said Fielding.

  * * *

  Cody found his thoughts wandering all week and it irritated him. Sharkey’s absence was intruding on his work, blocking his escape. Instead of dissolving into his nameless space, he found himself mulling over mental playbacks of episodes with his quirky housemate. Sharkey had come to their small commune more as a charity case than anything else. He’d had no place to go after leaving the hospital, a nurse had told Cody, except a county home. To be twenty-two and parked in a corridor between the elderly senile was Cody’s notion of purgatory. So they had voted and sent for him. There were times they had been sorry. Sharkey’s maniacal sense of the absurd bordered on true lunacy. Hunk Finn with a pinch of strange. There was the time he tried to enter his electric wheelchair in a dirt bike scramble. And the time he had gotten a ticket for tooling around town in rush hour traffic. The officer had been embarrassed but determined after Sharkey ran the red light in his wheelchair.

  But the man had brought some humor back into Cody’s life. He had made them all laugh. The house was subdued without the stero blasting country and western. They ate in silence.

  “He’ll be back Friday. This is stupid,” Bushnell said. “It’s like he said, it’s no big deal.”

  “We shoulda read the fine print,” Fielding mumbled.