Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction

by Leigh Grossman

  * * * *

  Graham took me to my cell. I climbed into the top bunk and lay still until my trembling faded.

  “The kid’s getting ready to make his move,” said Ivan Detbar.

  “You think so?” said Floyd.

  It was dinner hour. Inmates were shambling through the corridor towards Mess Nine.

  My thoughts were black, but I had a small idea.

  It seemed to me that one of my problems might solve the other. The way Graham had said “not here” to the man behind the desk made me think that the man’s influence might not extend very far within the prison, however extensive and malignant it was in the world at large. I had never seen him command anyone besides Graham. Graham was in charge of my block, but the trip upstairs had made me remember the immensity of the prison.

  My idea was simple, but it required physical bravery, not my specialty to this point. The cafeteria was the right place for it. With so many others at hand I might survive.

  “Floyd,” I said.

  “Yeah?”

  “What if you weren’t going to see me anymore? Would that change anything?”

  “What are you getting at?”

  “Anything you’d want to say?”

  “Take care, nice knowing ya,” he said.

  “How about ‘Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do’?” said Billy Lancing.

  Floyd and Billy laughed at that. I let them laugh. When they were done I said, “One last question, Floyd.”

  “Shoot.”

  I’d thought I was losing interest, growing numb. I guess in the longer term I was. But I was still pressing him. “Did you know your father?”

  “You’re asking me—what? My old man?” Floyd’s eye rolled, like he thought his father had appeared somewhere in the cell.

  “You knew him?”

  “If I could get my hands around the neck of that son of a bitch—”

  “You talk big, Floyd,” said Ivan. “What about when you had your chance?”

  “Fuck you,” said Floyd. “I was a kid. I barely knew that motherfucker.”

  “The Motherfuck Dog,” said John Jones. “He lives under the house—”

  The tears were on my face again, and without choosing to do it I was beating my fist against the wall, against Floyd’s petrified body. Once, twice, then it was too painful to go on. And I don’t think he noticed.

  I got down from the bunk. I had another place for the fury to go, a place where it might have a use. I only had to get myself to that place before I thought twice.

  Dinner was meatballs and mashed potatoes covered with steaming greyish gravy. I took two cups of black coffee aboard my tray as well. I turned out of the food line and located Lonely Boy, sitting with his seconds at a table on the far side of the crowded room. Before I could think again, I headed for them.

  “Hey, lonely boy, you want to sit?”

  I flung the tray so it spilled on all three of them. I was counting on that to slow the other two; all my attention would be on Lonely Boy. I knew I’d lose any fight that was a contest of strategy or guile, lose it badly, that my only chance was blind, instantaneous rage. So I went in with my hands instead of picking up a fork or some other weapon. For my plan to work, Lonely Boy had to live. With what I knew was in me to unleash, his life seemed as much at risk as mine.

  They pulled us apart before very long, but I’d already gotten my hands around his throat and begun hitting his head against the table, rhythmic revenge. One of his seconds had taken a tray and lashed open my scalp with it, and my blood was running into my opponent’s eyes, and my own, and mixing with the coffee on the table. The voices around us roared.

  * * * *

  Back in the hole for the night that followed, I screamed, bled, shat. I shoved the morning tray back out as it was coming through the slot. I attacked the men that came for me. How much was pretense I can’t really say. Maybe none. When they got me into the shower I calmed down somewhat. I didn’t feel human, though. I felt mercenary and cold, like frozen acid.

  They put six stitches in my scalp in the prison hospital and led me to another, larger office, with more file cabinets and chairs, more ashtrays. Graham was there, with two other men. One of the others did the talking.

  Those others were my margin, I knew. My glint of light.

  The one who spoke asked me about the fight.

  “If I’m put back in the block with him one of us will have to die,” I said simply.

  I could see a look of satisfaction on the face of the other of the men, not Graham. I assumed Lonely Boy had been trouble to this man before. I assumed, too, that I’d done damage. I smiled back at this man, and I smiled at Graham.

  Graham kept his face impassive.

  The man who was talking explained to me that Lonely Boy was an established presence on Block Nine, that he had more support than might have been apparent—did I understand that?

  “Move me upstairs,” I said. “As far away as possible. If I see him again I’ll have to kill him.”

  The one who was talking told me that I’d likely find men like Lonely Boy wherever I went in the prison.

  Nobody said the word rape.

  “I’ll never be in this position again,” I said. “I can promise you that. Nobody will ever be permitted to make the mistake he made.”

  The man raised his eyebrows. The other one, the smiling one, smiled. Graham sat.

  “Just move me,” I said.

  “We don’t let prisoners make our decisions for us, Mr. Marra,” said Graham.

  “Your unusual handling put me at a disadvantage in the situation, Mr. Graham. If you keep me on Block Nine I intend to be treated like the other prisoners.”

  The man who had been talking turned and looked at Graham, and in that moment I knew I would be transferred.

  “Unusual handling?” said the man who’d smiled. He’d directed the question at me, but it was Graham who spoke.

  “He presents unique difficulties,” he said. “His father is in the prison. In the wall. I thought it was better to address it directly.”

  I took a leaf from Floyd’s book. It was pure improvisation, but my skills at lying were improving rapidly. “He isn’t my father.”

  The smiling man made an inquiring face.

  “He knew my mother, I guess. But she told me later he wasn’t my father. He’s just some guy. Just another brick to me.”

  The smiling man smiled at Graham. “This doesn’t seem to me to require special treatment.”

  “I had the impression—” Graham began.

  The smiling man laughed. “Apparently mistaken, Graham.”

  Graham laughed along.

  * * * *

  Graham never spoke to me again, though I lived in fear of some reprisal. I would see him moving through the corridors with the men in charge of my block or other blocks and think he was about to point a finger at me and say, “Marra, come with me,” but he never did. I don’t think he cared enormously. It might have been some relief to him to be able to say to the man behind the desk that I’d slipped away. Graham was a man with a difficult job and dealing with the man behind the desk was clearly not an easy part of it.

  I never saw the man behind the desk again.

  He was a sadist and an idiot. The two were not mutually exclusive, I understood, after that day on the roof. The agency or service he worked for had assigned him the task of tracing a conspiracy he was a member of himself. Sending me in to question my father was just ritual activity. He might have been curious to know whether Hemphill had been talking about what was happening to him, but he wasn’t worried. He hadn’t even bothered to wire the cell, or he’d have known how I came up with “horseshoe crabs.” Until I’d panicked him, triggered his paranoia with that bluff, he was just making a show of activity by torturing me. And keeping himself entertained, I suppose, killing time on an absurd assignment.

  The only deeper explanation was that I’d become a kind of stand-in for Carl, the other young prisoner they’d had in
their grasp. He’d been theirs, for a time, and then he twisted loose, became history. I don’t know if what he did was a disastrous perversion of their plans, or whether it served them, but I sensed that either way they experienced a loss. The mechanism of control was more precious than any outcome. I’d become the new instrument, the new site where control was enacted. Until I broke the spell.

  From then on, I became another prisoner in a cell, living out my hours, protecting my back. I spent days in the weight room, years in the television room. I told lies to make the time pass. The rest of my story was no different from anyone else’s, so in the telling I made it as different as I could. I learned to use the phrase “fuck the wall,” though like a million other cowards, I never tried it.

  My thoughts rarely turned to Carl. I hadn’t learned much about the tortured prisoner and would-be assassin, and I didn’t have any interest in trying to learn more. The image of my thirteen-year-old friend had been obliterated without anything taking its place. I didn’t object. He was just a ghost now, and there were plenty of more substantial ghosts available, in the wall.

  I didn’t see my father again until a week before I left the prison, when I was granted a minute in my old cell.

  Billy Lancing was still the same. He looked me over when I came in and said, “Marra?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I remember you. Where’d you go?”

  “Upstairs.”

  “Well, I remember you.”

  I climbed up into the top bunk.

  Ivan Detbar was dead, his eyes stilled. I recognized it instantly by now. John Jones was still raving, but more quietly, not looking for an audience anymore.

  My father was still alive, if that’s the word for it, but someone had pried out his other eye, splintering the stony bridge of his nose in the process.

  His mouth was moving, but nothing was coming out.

  “Floyd’s not good,” said Billy.

  I went over and put my hand on him. He couldn’t feel it, of course. I was touching my father, but it didn’t matter to either of us.

  I wondered if it had been Graham or the man behind the desk who’d removed the eye, in some offhand act of revenge. It could as easily have been a living prisoner, someone in that top bunk who’d taken offense at too much attention, or a joke.

  Floyd, like Billy, had listened fairly well. That was the only real difference between him and the hundreds of other bricks I’d met by that time. What had happened between him and Carl was absurdly simple, but the man behind the desk was puzzled, because it wasn’t supposed to happen to an assassin-in-training, or to a human brick. They’d become friends. Floyd had expressed his dim, blundering sympathy, and Carl had listened, and been drawn out of his fear.

  Which was more or less all Floyd had done with me.

  Had he been pretending not to know me, pretending not to make the connection between my stories, my family history, and his? I’d stopped wondering pretty quickly. I had more immediate problems, which was part of his point, I think, if he was making one.

  Bricks only face one direction.

  I let my hand slip from the wall, and left the cell.

  * * * *

  Copyright © 1996 by Jonathan Lethem.

  MAUREEN F. McHUGH

  (1959– )

  I was just breaking into publishing when Maureen McHugh’s first novel, China Mountain Zhang (1992), came out, and it’s hard to overstate the reaction it caused, and just how fresh a perspective Maureen brought to gender issues in the field. China Mountain Zhang won the Tiptree and Lambda Awards and was nominated for both the Hugo and the Nebula. She’s remained a fresh voice, though not a prolific one, with only four novels and about twenty short stories written in the last two decades.

  An Ohio native, Maureen earned a BA at Ohio University (where she studied with Daniel Keyes, of “Flowers for Algernon” fame) and an MA at NYU. After several years as a part-time college instructor, technical writer, and various other jobs, she spent a year teaching in Shijiazhuang, China. Her first story, ”All in a Day’s Work” (1988) appeared in Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone Magazine under a male pseudonym.

  Maureen is currently a partner at No Mimes Media, an alternate reality game company which she co-founded in March of 2009. Before that, she was a writer and managing editor for numerous game projects, including Year Zero and I Love Bees. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband and stepson.

  “The Lincoln Train” is a sparkling piece of alternate history from a writer who has a knack for taking her ideas in unexpected directions. Set in an alternate Civil War era where Lincoln is shot but survives his assassination attempt, the story won a Hugo and was nominated for several other awards.

  THE LINCOLN TRAIN, by Maureen F. Mchugh

  First published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, April 1995

  Soldiers of the G.A.R. stand alongside the tracks. They are General Dodge’s soldiers, keeping the tracks maintained for the Lincoln Train. If I stand right, the edges of my bonnet are like blinders and I can’t see the soldiers at all. It is a spring evening. At the house, the lilacs are blooming. My mother wears a sprig pinned to her dress under her cameo. I can smell it, even in the crush of these people all waiting for the train. I can smell the lilac, and the smell of too many people crowded together, and a faint taste of cinders on the air. I want to go home, but that house is not ours anymore. I smooth my black dress. On the train platform we are all in mourning.

  The train will take us to St. Louis, from whence we will leave for the Oklahoma territories. They say we will walk, but I don’t know how my mother will do that. She has been poorly since the winter of ’62. I check my bag with our water and provisions.

  “Julia Adelaide,” my mother says, “I think we should go home.”

  “We’ve come to catch the train,” I say, very sharp.

  I’m Clara, my sister Julia is eleven years older than me. Julia is married and living in Tennessee. My mother blinks and touches her sprig of lilac uncertainly. If I am not sharp with her, she will keep on it.

  I wait. When I was younger I used to try to school my unruly self in Christian charity. God sends us nothing we cannot bear. Now I only try to keep it from my face, try to keep my outer self disciplined. There is a feeling inside me, an anger, that I can’t even speak. Something is being bent, like a bow, bending and bending and bending—

  “When are we going home?” my mother says.

  “Soon,” I say because it is easy.

  But she won’t remember and in a moment she’ll ask again. And again and again, through this long, long train ride to St. Louis. I am trying to be a Christian daughter, and I remind myself that it is not her fault that the war turned her into an old woman, or that her mind is full of holes and everything new drains out. But it’s not my fault either. I don’t even try to curb my feelings and I know that they rise up to my face. The only way to be true is to be true from the inside and I am not. I am full of unchristian feelings. My mother’s infirmity is her trial, and it is also mine.

  I wish I were someone else.

  The train comes down the track, chuffing, coming slow. It is an old, badly used thing, but I can see that once it was a model of chaste and beautiful workmanship. Under the dust it is a dark claret in color. It is said that the engine was built to be used by President Lincoln, but since the assassination attempt he is too infirm to travel. People begin to push to the edge of the platform, hauling their bags and worldly goods. I don’t know how I will get our valise on. If Zeke could have come I could have at least insured that it was loaded on, but the Negroes are free now and they are not to help. The notice said no family Negroes could come to the station, although I see their faces here and there through the crowd.

  The train stops outside the station to take on water.

  “Is it your father?” my mother says diffidently. “Do you see him on the train?”

  “No, Mother,” I say. “We are taking the train.”

  “Are we going
to see your father?” she asks.

  It doesn’t matter what I say to her, she’ll forget it in a few minutes, but I cannot say yes to her. I cannot say that we will see my father even to give her a few moments of joy.

  “Are we going to see your father?” she asks again.

  “No,” I say.

  “Where are we going?”

  I have carefully explained it all to her and she cried every time I did. People are pushing down the platform toward the train, and I am trying to decide if I should move my valise toward the front of the platform. Why are they in such a hurry to get on the train? It is taking us all away.

  “Where are we going? Julia Adelaide, you will answer me this moment,” my mother says, her voice too full of quaver to quite sound like her own.

  “I’m Clara,” I say. “We’re going to St. Louis.”

  “St. Louis,” she says. “We don’t need to go to St. Louis. We can’t get through the lines, Julia, and I…I am quite indisposed. Let’s go back home now, this is foolish.”

  We cannot go back home. General Dodge has made it clear that if we did not show up at the train platform this morning and get our names checked off the list, he would arrest every man in town, and then he would shoot every tenth man. The town knows to believe him, General Dodge was put in charge of the trains into Washington, and he did the same thing then. He arrested men and held them and every time the train was fired upon he hanged a man.

  There is a shout and I can only see the crowd moving like a wave, pouring off the edge of the platform. Everyone is afraid there will not be room. I grab the valise and I grab my mother’s arm and pull them both. The valise is so heavy that my fingers hurt, and the weight of our water and food is heavy on my arm. My mother is small and when I put her in bed at night she is all tiny like a child, but now she refuses to move, pulling against me and opening her mouth wide, her mouth pink inside and wet and open in a wail I can just barely hear over the shouting crowd. I don’t know if I should let go of the valise to pull her, and for a moment I think of letting go of her, letting someone else get her on the train and finding her later.