The Girl Who Loved Animals and Other Stories

by McAllister, Bruce

  He didn’t believe me.

  “Was Lieutenant Balsam there?” he asked.

  I said no, he wasn’t, trying not to cry. I didn’t know why, but he wasn’t, I said.

  His eyes changed. He was staring at me now.

  He said, “When will this happen, Mary?”

  I said I didn’t know—not for a couple of days at least, but I couldn’t be sure, how could I be sure? It felt like four, maybe five, days, but I couldn’t be sure. I was crying again. This is what made him believe me in the end.

  He knew it would never happen if Steve were there—but if Steve was gone, if the men waited until Steve was gone?

  Steve would be gone in a couple of days and there was no way that this nurse, scared and crying, could know this.

  He moved me to his bunker and had someone hang canvas to make a hooch for me inside his. He doubled the guards and changed the guards and doubled them again, but I knew he didn’t think it was going to happen until Steve left.

  I cried that night. He came to my hooch. He said, “Don’t be frightened, Mary. No one’s going to hurt you. No one’s going to hurt anyone.”

  But he wasn’t sure. He hadn’t tried to stop a dream from coming true—even though I’d asked him to—and he didn’t know whether he could or not.

  I told him I wanted him to hold me, someone to hold me. I told him I wanted him to touch my forehead the way he did, to push my hair back the way he did.

  At first he didn’t understand, but he did it.

  I told him I wanted someone to make love to me tonight, because it hadn’t happened in so long, not with Steve, not with anyone. He said he understood and that if he’d only known he could have made things easier on me.

  He was quiet. He made sure the flaps on my hooch were tight and he undressed in the dark. I held his hand just like I’d held the hands of the others, back in Cam Ranh Bay. I remembered the dream, the real one where I killed him, how I’d held his hand while he got undressed, just like this.

  Even in the dark I could see how pale he was and this was like the dream, too. He seemed to glow in the dark even though there wasn’t any light. I took off my clothes, too. I told him I wanted to do something special for him. He said fine, but we couldn’t make much noise. I said there wouldn’t be any noise. I told him to lie down on his stomach on the cot. I sounded excited. I even laughed. I told him it was called “around the world” and I liked it best with the man on his stomach. He did what I told him and I kneeled down and lay over him.

  I jammed the needle with the morphine into his jugular and when he struggled I held him down with my own weight.

  No one came for a long time.

  When they did, I was crying and they couldn’t get my hand from the needle.

  Steve’s team wasn’t sent. The dreams stopped, just the way Bucannon thought they would. Because I killed a man to keep another alive, the dreams stopped. I tell myself now this was what it was all about. I was supposed to keep someone from dying—that’s why the dreams began—and when I did, they could stop, they could finally stop. Bucannon would understand it.

  “There is no talent like yours, Mary, that does not operate out of the psychological needs of the individual,” he would have said. “You dreamed of death in the hope of stopping it. We both knew that, didn’t we. When you killed me to save another, it could end, the dreams could stop, your gift could return to the darkness where it had lain for a million years—so unneeded in civilization, in times of peace, in the humdrum existence of teenagers in Long Beach, California, where fathers believed their daughters to be whores or lesbians if they went to war to keep others alive. Am I right, Mary?”

  This is what he would have said.

  They could have killed me. They could have taken me out into the jungle and killed me. They could have given me a frontal and put me in a military hospital like the man in ’46 who had evidence that Roosevelt knew about the Japanese attack on Pearl. The agency Bucannon had worked for could have sent word down to have me pushed from a chopper on the way back to Saigon, or had me given an overdose, or assigned me to some black op I’d never come back from. There were a lot things they could have done, and they didn’t.

  They didn’t because of what Steve and the others did. They told them you’ll have to kill us all if you kill her or hurt her in any way. They told them you can’t send her to jail, you can send her to a hospital but not for long, and you can’t fuck with her head, or there will be stories in the press and court trials and a bigger mess than My Lai ever was.

  It was seventy-six talents who were saying this, so the agency listened.

  Steve told me about it the first time he came. I’m here for a year, that’s all. There are ten other women in this wing and we get along—it’s like a club. They leave us alone.

  Steve comes to see me once a month. He’s married—to the same one in Merced—and they’ve got a baby now, but he gets the money to fly down somehow and he tells me she doesn’t mind.

  He says the world hasn’t turned blue since he got back, except maybe twice, real fast, on freeways in central California. He says he hasn’t floated out of his body except once, when Cathy was having the baby and it started to come out wrong. It’s fading away, he says, and he says it with a laugh, with those big eyelashes and those great shoulders.

  Some of the others come, too, to see if I’m okay. Most of them got out as soon as they could. They send me packages and bring me things. We talk about the mess this country is in, and we talk about getting together, right after I get out. I don’t know if they mean it. I don’t know if we should. I tell Steve it’s over, we’re back in the Big PX and we don’t need it anymore—Bucannon was right—and maybe we shouldn’t get together.

  He shakes his head. He gives me a look and I give him a look and we both know we should have used the room that night in Cam Ranh Bay, when we had the chance.

  “You never know,” he says, grinning. “You never know when the baby might wake up.”

  That’s the way he talks these days, now that he’s a father.

  “You never know when the baby might wake up.”

  Dream Baby

  Story Notes

  In l971, thanks to mutual friends, I met a Vietnam vet by the name of Art who’d been back from the war for about a year and was, well, working as a bodyguard at the time, and carrying, in what I thought was a sports-gear case, an H&K assault rifle. We were stuck together in a bus station while those mutual friends chatted. When Art and I had used up the usual small talk, there was a long silence and he finally said, “So you’re a science fiction writer. Here’s something for you. In firefights in Nam, the world—I don’t know exactly how to say this—turned blue for me and slowed down and I’d—I’d leave my body to see what I needed to do. That’s the only way I know how to put it. I came back from every fight because of it and that’s why certain people were interested in me after the war. They didn’t care about how I did it—just that I did—that I came back from every firefight.” Art wasn’t bragging; he also wasn’t, as I learned over the years that we’d be friends, playing head games with me. He liked people and marveled at the universe, and he didn’t care whether I believed him or not; I found that more persuasive than anything else. Over the course of our friendship I received hard evidence that many of his tallest tales (like “certain people” being interested in him after the war) were true; but as a science fiction writer I didn’t really need to have proof of what he was saying about his ESP experiences that day or any other. I needed only to find in his stories about combat ESP a sense of wonder and vision of the human condition—what we received as gifts and talents, what we do with them in life, and how others may try to use them: the stuff of fiction, and science fiction in particular. I also knew that day, as I decided to commit to however long it would take to research and write a novel about combat ESP, that this project would allow me, out of the survivor’s guilt I was starting to feel (as I met more and more guys who’d gone in my stead to Vietnam)
, to get to know the other half of my generation (those who hadn’t remained safely in college), to do whatever penance I felt, as the son of an Annapolis graduate, I should do, and to fully understand a war I’d creatively avoided and profoundly believed neither hawks nor doves truly understood. That decision would lead to fifteen years of paper research into right-wing and left-wing politics; interviews with scholars and policymakers and extreme organizations; access to still-classified plans to end the war in Vietnam; but, most importantly, to interviews and correspondence with two hundred vets of three American conflicts—veterans ranging from a barefoot grunt from West Virginia to a former CIA director—many of whom had had ESP experiences both in combat and later.

  Do I believe in ESP? As a fiction writer, I don’t need to believe in ESP; I simply need to write stories, and if those stories use ESP, that is fine. But I do, so many years later, happen to believe in it now because of the “anecdotal spontaneous data” that exist from those who’ve experienced it as well as the hard core of skeptical and rigorous studies that suggest its existence; but also because of the synchronicities that happened during the research and writing of the novel, which turned out, after all, to be but a kind of “channeling,” as one New Agey friend put it in the ’80s, of the voices and experiences of the many vets for whom the novel speaks and who cared so much about the novel as it was being written. A section of the book received a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, and the novel itself was reviewed as sf, fantasy, horror, psychological thriller, and pure war novel. The novel has been called “one of the most collaborative war novels ever written,” and also “one of the most memorable chronicles of the Vietnam war.” The former, of course, explains the latter, since I was never in that war. But a novel like that one doesn’t take shape overnight and from the author’s isolated vanity; and I’d like to share a couple of things about its evolution if for no other reason than that new novelists may find in the following a crucial lesson: Never throw away anything you’ve written, no matter how embarrassing you may feel it is.

  About seven years into those fifteen years of research and interviews, and because I was a great Robert Ludlum fan at the time, I wrote a proto-Dream Baby novel. It was godawful. I’m not Ludlum and never will be (there’s a lesson in that too), and the manuscript, except for about 10,000 words of its 80K bulk, wasn’t even a good parody. I wrote one draft, then turned on it and set it aside. But something whispered from it—the spirit of it, the vets I’d interviewed so far, the human suffering of war and its redemptions, too—and about a year later I picked it up again. There, in the middle of the manuscript—in a third-person, international-thriller-mimicking failure of a novel—was a strange thing: a first-person account—inspired by the “oral histories” of Vietnam, oral histories whose voices weren’t elegant literary prose but whose very failures to be so captured war and the human soul much more beautifully, I thought, than literary prose could—of a nurse in Vietnam who dreamed the deaths of her patients and couldn’t save them. What in the hell was this doing in the middle of the novel? It had no function, no reason, made no sense, and yet it—along with some of the more lyrical passages about a vet with ESP now living in Orange County, California (6000 words worth—see the story notes on “Little Boy Blue” later in this collection)—held, I realized, the entire heart of the novel. While the Ludlum imitation was what I, the candy-assed armchair civilian, would do with such material, the Army-nurse voice had come from the vets I’d been interviewing. I’d almost thrown—literally thrown—the Terrible Ludlumesque Novel away, and with it this Army nurse. I took that section and ran with it, as writers do, and when it was finally a realized short story—the one you see in this collection—my friend and mentor Barry Malzberg directed it toward the Danns and their anthology, In the Field of Fire. From there it was reprinted by Gardner Dozois in Asimov’s and his “year’s best” volume, reached the finalist ballots for the Hugo and Nebula Awards, and as a consequence I received a contract for a novel-length expansion from Beth Meacham at Tor Books. But all of this was the world of publishing, and the short story and novel belonged—and do so to this day—to the vets themselves. Just after the short story was published, I found an oral history of nurses in Vietnam entitled A Piece of My Heart; one particular chapter was by a nurse named Jill Mishkel, and she sounded just like my story’s heroine, Mary Damico. I wrote to Jill saying so and enclosed the story. She wrote back: “Yes, it does sound like me. Exactly. And by the way, Bruce, I’m a science fiction fan. Would you like me to be a consultant on your novel?” That began the strange and marvelous journey the novel would take as it gathered, through one synchronicity or another—some of them (like the vet who found himself standing on the Red Dikes taking pictures for me when my intelligence community contacts couldn’t get those pictures) truly astonishing—the thirty consultants that would make it the collaborative miracle it turned out to be.

  The Man Inside

  I am ten and a half years old, and I must be important because I’m the only one they let into this laboratory of the hospital. My father is in the other room of this laboratory. He’s what Dr. Plankt calls a “catatonic” because Dad just sits in one position all the time like he can’t make up his mind what to do. And that makes Dr. Plankt sad, but today Dr. Plankt is happy because of his new machine and what it will do with Dad.

  Dr. Plankt said, “This is the first time a computer will be able to articulate a man’s thoughts.” That means that when they put the “electrodes” (those are wires) on Dad’s head, and the “electrodes” are somehow attached to Dr. Plankt’s big machine with the spinning tapes on it, that machine will tell us what’s in Dad’s head. Dr. Plankt also said, “Today we dredge the virgin silence of an in-state catatonic for the first time in history.” So Dr. Plankt is happy today.

  I am, too, for Dad, because he will be helped by this “experiment” (everything that’s happening today) and for Dr. Plankt, who is good to me. He helps me make my “ulcer” (a hurting sore inside me) feel better, and he also gives me pills for my “hypertension” (what’s wrong with my body). He told me, “Your father has an ulcer like yours, Keith, and hypertension, too, so we’ve got to take care of you. You’re much too young to be carrying an ulcer around in you. Look at your father now. We don’t want what happened to your father to happen . . .”

  He didn’t finish what he was saying, so I didn’t understand all of it. Just that I should keep healthy and calm and not worry. I’m a lot like Dad, I know that much. Even if Dad worried a lot before he became a “catatonic” and I don’t worry much because I don’t have many things to worry about. “Yet,” Dr. Plankt told me.

  We’re waiting for the big “computer” to tell us what’s in Dad’s head! A few minutes ago Dr. Plankt said that his machine might help his “theory” (a bunch of thoughts) about “personality symmetry in correlation with schizophrenia.” He didn’t tell me what he meant by that because he wasn’t talking to me when he said it. He was talking to another doctor, and I was just listening. I think what he said has to do with Dad’s personality, which Mom says is rotten because he’s always so grouchy and nervous and picky. Mom says I shouldn’t ever be like Dad. She’s always telling me that, and she shouts a lot.

  Except when she brings people home from her meetings.

  I don’t think Dr. Plankt likes Mom. Once Dr. Plankt came over to our house, which is on Cypress Street, and Mom was at one of her meetings, and Dr. Plankt and I sat in the living room and talked. I said, “It’s funny how Dad and me have ulcers and hypertension. ‘Like father, like son.’ Mom says that. It’s kind of funny.” Dr. Plankt got mad at something then and said to me, “It’s not funny, Keith! With what she’s doing to you both, your mother, not your father, is the one who should be in a mental inst—” He didn’t finish his last word, and I don’t know what it was and what he was mad about. Maybe he was mad at me.

  Many times Dr. Plankt says that he wants to take me away from Cypress Street and put me in a better—
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  Wait! The computer just typed something! It works just like a typewriter but without anyone’s hands on it. The words it is typing are from Dad’s head! Dr. Plankt has the piece of paper in his hands now. He’s showing it to three doctors. Now he’s showing it to Mom. Mom is starting to cry! I’ve never seen her cry before. I want to see the words from Dad’s head!

  Another doctor is looking at me, and he has the paper now. I say, “Can I see it! Can I see it?” He looks at me again, and I think he knows who I am because Dr. Plankt talks about me a lot to everyone. I must be important. I don’t like the look on this other doctor’s face. It’s like the look Uncle Josh gets when he’s feeling sad about something. This other doctor closes his eyes for a minute and comes over to me with the paper. The paper, the paper! The words from Dad’s head. The words are:

  OH OH

  MY MY

  WIFE! SON!

  I I

  CERTAINLY CERTAINLY

  DO DO

  NOT NOT

  WANT WANT

  TO TO

  LIVE! DIE!

  When I squint my eyes and look at these words from Dad’s head, they look like a man in a hat with his arms out, kind of like Dad—except that there’s a split down the middle of this man.

  It’s funny, but I know just how Dad feels.

  The Man Inside

  Story Notes

  I’ve always been a great fan of what in the ’70s was called “intermedia”—the ways graphic elements and text can be brought together on the page for synergistic impact. When I wrote this story as a junior in college, I hadn’t yet been exposed to experimental writing—the “intermedia,” “found poetry,” “concrete poetry” of the ’70s—though I would be a few years later through good friend, poet, and fellow Claremont alum, William L. Fox (Driving to Mars, Terra Antarctica, many others). Bill would go on to win Guggenheims and grants from NASA and become one the country’s major writers on how human beings perceive and interact with their environments—but his West Coast Poetry Review and WCPR Press, in the meantime, I’d be involved with editorially for a number of years (publishing, as we did, people like Richard Kostelanetz, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Raymond Federman, and other major experimental poets). That interest in “intermedia” I dragged with me to graduate school, to that MFA program, where I tried at one point (since we were required to take a class in “a second art form”) to see if fiction could indeed be combined with graphics—“text with visuals” in an integrated storyline way. It would be tricky, I knew, because the human brain experiences the semantic symbolism of language very differently from visual images—that is, “suspension of disbelief” would be different for the two media—but what I hadn’t expected was the reactions the proposal got from the two different departments. The novelist I suggested the project to, showing him an example of what I had in mind (“This is the house that Jack built: [show house]. This is the house Jack should have built: [show other house].”), grimaced and said, “Why in God’s name would you want to put pictures in a text? It’s distracting.” The painter I then proposed it to said, of course, “That font is ugly.” As I said, it’s a tricky thing to combine media—or to combine them well—but the best intermedia artists/writers, like the best experimental novelists and performance artists and conceptual artists, do pull it off. Compared to their efforts, this little story—a tiny thing by a very young man—isn’t much; but, hey, it does prove I had that “concrete poetry” impulse in me long before graduate school or I wouldn’t, on that cloudy, forlorn day in Claremont, California, have seen “The Man Inside” as the very visual thing it is. The indebtedness of this story in other ways to Daniel Keyes’s Flowers for Algernon—a short story and novel that showed me at an early age the power of first-person fiction, especially “naïve” first-person-voiced fiction should be obvious. “The Man Inside” was not my first story and it wouldn’t be my last using such a voice. This story appeared originally in Fred Pohl’s Galaxy in 1969, and went on to see reprinting, thanks to Harry Harrison, in the Harrison/Aldiss “year’s best” volume, the Asimov/Greenberg/Olander 100 Great Science Fiction Short Short Stories, and two college readers.