Gravity Box and Other Spaces

by Mark Tiedemann

  “Don’t you think somebody with your academic record would have been given special consideration?”

  “No, I don’t. I’ve never gotten special consideration.”

  “Have you ever tried?”

  Jen looked away. She wanted Ella to stop talking. It was too late now for everything; more words would change nothing.

  “What happened in fifth grade? Your average fell apart, your attendance declined.”

  “My father wanted me to drop out. He’d joined some church that taught against state education, science, politics, anything they couldn’t understand. He was angry. I made him angry. He—he’d lock me in my room. He said there was no reason for me to have an education, that it was costing him money. It wasn’t, but he didn’t know that. I’d escape and go to school, stay at friends’ houses until he found me and raised hell with the parents so I wouldn’t be welcome back.

  “I finally figured out that I had to fight back, so I documented the abuse and filed the data somewhere safe. I told him I’d have him arrested if he didn’t leave me alone. It took a while to convince him. I had to arrange for a visit from a state family services agent, but he finally believed me and let me be. He drank a lot then.”

  “Why didn’t you use the same threat to get them to agree to this program?”

  “Statute of limitations ran out. I had to file those charges within eighteen months. He didn’t know that then, but he found out later.”

  “You’ve been paying your way through all your special classes?”

  Jen shrugged then nodded.

  Ella frowned. “All the checks to the school have been through your parents’ account.”

  Jen rolled her eyes. “Look, I take the money out of my account and transfer it to theirs, then write the check. The books always balance since I do that, too. Any more questions?”

  “Jen, let me help.”

  “Can you get me into space?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Jen went to the table and sat down. She looked at Ella evenly, spoke in soft, reasonable tones.

  “I want to go to space. I decided years ago that that’s what I wanted. That’s my choice. Now, if you want to help me, then you do that. I want to get off this planet, somewhere—somewhere my father can’t ever get to me.”

  “You’re just running away from your troubles.”

  Jen slammed her fist on the table. “When you reach majority, it’s called making choices, but at my age it’s ‘running away from your troubles.’ I’m just trying to run my life! Don’t analyze me!”

  Ella regarded her for a long time. Jen began to think she was just going to stare at her until the time was up.

  Finally, Ella let out a loud breath.

  “All right,” she said. “I’m going to make you an offer, but you have to agree to my terms.”

  “What terms?”

  “I want you to move into the school. I’ll find a way to pay for the voluntary dorms. I want you to request separation from your parents.” She held up her hand as Jen opened her mouth to protest. “Listen first. Do this and I will intercede with the review board and do everything I can to see to it you still get selected for the co-op study program. But I can’t do anything until you legally remove yourself from your parents. Understand me? You’re going to have to trust me.”

  “What about this little incident?”

  “I think I can get that overturned and thrown out. You didn’t do anything, did you?”

  Jen shook her head.

  “Okay. Now, you’ll probably have to stay here for another day. I’m going to go to see someone in the court and get you remanded to my custody. Then we go back to school. Okay?”

  Jen narrowed her eyes, unsure how to feel, what to think.

  “I’m offering you the only chance you’re going to have to get what you want. If you’d trusted somebody before this it wouldn’t be so hard, no matter what you assumed was going to happen. Do we have a deal?”

  Reluctantly, Jen nodded.

  Ella smiled and stood. “Okay. Go back to your cell now. I’ll get this started. I’ll be back as soon as I can to get you. We’ll get this problem solved, okay?”

  “Okay.” Jen forced a thin smile.

  Ella reached across the table and squeezed Jen’s hand. Then she went to the door behind her and pressed a button.

  Jen’s guard escorted her back to her cell. Jen had a lot to consider now. She knew better than to get her hopes up, but she also knew she had little choice. Maybe it was possible she had misjudged, misunderstood. She was not prepared to admit that totally, though she wanted to believe that Ella Preston, at least, wanted to help. It made her feel younger to believe that. She stretched out on her cot. Her thoughts drifted. She slept.

  Hours later the rattle of a lock woke her. She opened her eyes and jumped to her feet, startled that Ella could have gotten all the red tape untangled so quickly.

  Her father stood in the doorway.

  “You’re lucky I called in a missing child report after you ran off,” he said. Jen huddled against the right rear door, as far from him as she could get, her hands useless in her lap. The handcuffs he had slapped on her as soon as they were out of the station were cutting off her circulation. At least he had let her put her own clothes back on.

  “You could’ve ended up in juve or sent to a rehab clinic. I can tell you those aren’t fun. Better that I could bring you home. Very lucky. Don’t ever run away like that again.”

  It’s not Ella’s fault, Jen thought over and over, not her fault at all; this is a bureaucratic fuckup, red tape all over it, not her fault, damn it.

  “I have a friend,” her father was saying, “in the department. He’s a member of our Order. He let me know as soon as you were found. He also wiped your record, so you can’t be traced.”

  Just like that her numbness vanished, cut through by fear. She stared at the man. “Where are we going?”

  He did not answer. He continued to drive. She wondered aloud who in his “Order” had lent him a car.

  He sighed wearily and gave a little sad shake of his head. He pulled to the side of the street, put the car in park, and then leaned over the seat and slapped her across the face. He grabbed her collar and pulled her closer and slapped her again, slamming her back into the corner. Blood filled her mouth. He pointed a finger at her.

  “The first thing you have to relearn,” he said, “is not to ask questions. That’s not your place. You don’t need to know—you don’t have a right to know except what I tell you. You don’t have any business asking. Understand?”

  When she did not answer he nodded once and continued driving.

  “You’ve been used to getting your own way,” he said. “That’s all got to change. It was a mistake being so indulgent. I haven’t done you any favors. I’ve handicapped you, gave you a false picture of the world, of reality. You’d’ve had nothing but trouble trying to survive with that notion. It’s all going to change, though. All of it.”

  Jen looked out the window. Without the cuffs on her wrists she might have been able to jump from the car and run. Again.

  Warren pulled into an alley and onto a parking pad. Jen looked around. There wasn’t much she could see. The street was almost completely dark except for a single light that shone down the length of the alley, leaving more shadow than substance along unadorned walls and crumbling blacktop. He shut off the engine, got out, and came around to her door. He opened it. Before Jen could move, he grabbed the handcuffs and jerked her out. She lost her footing and stumbled against him. He pulled her up and for a few seconds she hung there, all her weight on her wrists. Finally, she managed to get her feet under her and stand. Tears blurred her vision. A dog barked nearby. Warren dragged her from the car and into a yard to an ill-lit door.

  “Not a word once we get inside,” he said and banged on the door. After a moment a man opened it, grinned, and let them in.

  “Hey, Warren! What you got here?”

  “Jerry, this is my
daughter, Jennifer.” He pulled her through the kitchen. “Mind if I keep her here for a couple of days?”

  “No, no, not at all. Go right ahead. Use the meetin’ room if you want.” He grinned at her. “Nice to meet you. I’m Jerry.”

  At the end of a short hallway, he pulled open a door and switched on a light. He walked her down into the basement as if she were on a leash. Jen felt despair rising, like water to drown her. It would have been easy just then to shut her eyes and hope it was a dream, but she needed to know where he was taking her, where he was putting her.

  The first thing she saw was a rack of guns along one wall, butted against a washer and dryer. A table contained pistols and knives. A lawn mower was partly hidden under a tarp, beneath a thicket of fishing gear that hung from a crossbeam.

  Warren dragged her to a door, pushed it open, and shoved her through. There was a cot, a stack of folding chairs, and a small table with bundles of pamphlets stacked on it. Warren shut the door behind him. Jen faced him, trembling, wishing she could control her fear.

  “That woman from the school,” he said. “She came by the apartment, looking for you. Said she was a counselor or something. From space. Hah!” He looked at her, grinning lopsidedly. “I asked what she wanted with you. She said you had applied for a study grant or something. They had accepted you as long as we agreed to it. ‘Study grant for what,’ I asked. ‘Travel to space,’ she said. Space! Imagine. I said she must have the wrong Jennifer. My Jennifer didn’t apply for any grant. My Jennifer wouldn’t qualify.” He looked at her, his grin fading into malevolence.

  “She had all the documentation, though. Everything. You were the right Jennifer. Seems you’ve been lying to those people for quite a while. Signing my name, your mother’s. Telling those people that we support you in this and that so you could go to space? Why would you want to do that?” He grunted and shook his head. “I said it didn’t make sense. I said I couldn’t see why you’d want to go to space. After what those bastard orbitals did, you couldn’t. It’d be a betrayal of everything I raised you to be. But I guess if you’ve been lying to them, then you’ve been lying to us, too.”

  “Daddy—”

  He backhanded her. She hit the wall and slid to the floor, stunned.

  “Everything all right, Warren?” Jerry called.

  “You signed my name!” He grabbed the cuffs and pulled her to her feet. Pain shot down the length of her arms. “And that woman—that bitch—had the gall to tell me that it was pretty obvious why you’d want to go to space!”

  Her wrists felt dislocated; her fingers tingled. He threw her onto the cot.

  He stood over her, glaring, his eyes showing white all around. She felt his rage, like heat off pavement. Jen’s chest shook with the effort to breathe without crying. She felt somehow that it would be a mistake to start crying.

  Warren Cable stepped toward her and pulled a key from his shirt pocket. Slowly, he unlocked the cuffs. Jen looked at her wrists. They were bruised and cut and starting to swell.

  “I have to return these,” he said and slid the cuffs into his jacket pocket. “You’ll stay here until you learn how to be what you’re supposed to be.”

  He left the room, locking the door behind him. Jen stared at the door for a long time, aware only of her breathing, the throb in her wrists, and an ashen coldness inside.

  “So what am I supposed to be, Daddy?” she asked at last. She took the pillow from the cot and propped it against the door, then sat with her back against it.

  The next day, Jerry came with a tray of food—double cheeseburger, fries, and a soda. He set the tray on the cot. Jen watched him from where she sat on the floor by the table, her legs drawn up under her chin.

  “Comfy?” he asked.

  Jen shrugged then shook her head. Jerry was overweight, but it gave him a round, friendly face. When he smiled his eyes became slits. His thinning hair was combed straight back and he had a faded tattoo on his left arm that she could not make out.

  “Hmm. You sure are pretty,” he said.

  Jen frowned, trying to suppress a shudder. Jerry regarded her a few seconds longer, then grunted and left. The bolt shot home, and Jen stared at the door.

  After a while she went to the cot and started to eat. The food was cold, but she was hungry. She ate half the cheeseburger before picking up the soda.

  When she was finished she felt a little better, but her wrists still ached. She went to the table and looked at some of the cheaply-done pamphlets. “The Illusion of the Literate Woman,” “The Rib Shall Not Speak,” “Undoing the Disorder of Equality.”

  Cohonists, she realized. She knew about them, had read about the movement in a social studies class, but she had paid little attention. It felt like ancient history, the way people believed and acted long ago. Two centuries of constant work to establish social equality, gender equality, make civil rights real, and still this throwback nonsense kept coming up. She should have recognized the signs in her father, that he was into something more organized than the usual fringe pathologies.

  Warren was a broken man, she knew, and had been for years. The more difficult it was for him to find anything productive, anything meaningful, the more he embraced all these hateful excuses for explanations. She tried to feel sympathy for him, but it kept turning into pity and more often contempt. For him to feel in any way worthwhile, somebody had to be less, somebody had to be kept down. She would not allow him to make her small just so he could feel big. It just wasn’t going to work that way.

  She opened the drawer under the table. Blank paper, paper clips, rubber bands, a package of unsharpened pencils. Nothing she could really use for anything. Jen realized then that she was looking for a way out. She began searching the room more purposefully, careful to be as quiet as possible. But other than the stack of folding chairs next to her cot, there did not appear to be anything useful.

  The bolt shot back. Jen froze her hands on one of the chairs. Seconds went by before the door began to move inward. Jerry stepped into the room. He grinned nervously and laughed self-consciously.

  “Anything else you need?”

  Jen stared at him. He wiped perspiration from his face and took a step forward. Jen tightened her grip on the chair.

  “Uh—your dad won’t be back till tonight—”

  He took another step. Jen drew a deep breath. Her legs felt watery.

  “What you doin’ there? The cot’s more comfy.” He leaned down to pat the cover, never taking his eyes from hers.

  Jen licked her lips. He chuckled at that and straightened. She stepped back with the chair, raised it, and thrust it feet first at him catching him by the throat. He went over backward, against the table. Bundles of pamphlets fell heavily on him as he hit the floor. Jen raised the chair over her head and brought it down as hard as she could. She heard a crack and his bleat of pain. She dropped the chair and ran out the door. She pulled it closed behind her and locked it.

  Jen stopped at the table of weapons. A lot of them looked old, useless, but a few were new, some looked military. She went to the table and sorted through the pistols. She had never shot a gun before, was unsure she really wanted to. She almost gave up when something caught her eye. She grabbed a black object that fit her hand easily. When she pressed the stud with her thumb a black blade a bit longer than her palm extruded. Another touch and it retracted. She dropped it into her pocket.

  Jerry started banging on door, yelling. Jen ran up the stairs and down the hall to the back door. Through the window, she saw a truck pull onto the pad, three men in its cab. Jen gulped air and ran the other way.

  The living room was cluttered with chairs, books, more pamphlets, and a gun cabinet. Someone knocked at the back door. Jen turned away from the sound, her heart pounding. Three deadbolts barred the front door.

  She fumbled with them, sure the back door would open at any moment. Finally, the last bolt turned, and she burst into the street. She took one look back at the plain white frame house, number 5151, th
en ran up a side street and down another, ran until her lungs burned and her legs hurt. She had no idea where she was. She slipped into an alley, eventually coming to the rear of an apartment building. She sat on the steps and stared at the streets, recovering her breath, trying to figure out what to do next. A few cars were parked nearby, but she saw no people. Night was coming on quickly.

  She took the knife out of her pocket and studied it. She did not know how to use it, but for now she intended to hang onto it until it was forcefully taken from her. It was something to hold between herself and the world.

  “Nasty toy.”

  She jumped up, knife in hand, pointing straight out. Cantril stood leaning against the wall, just above her.

  She managed not to cry while she talked to Cantril, answering his questions, explaining. When she finished telling him all that had happened and why, Cantril grunted. “Going to space. That’s a new one. Do you take everything to extremes?”

  There was an ugly sarcasm in his voice. Jen frowned.

  Cantril shook his head. “Most of us never had a choice about where we ran to. No more than we had a choice about what we were running from. Most of us never had a chance at school, not real ones, anyway. Some of get pissed listening to bitching from people like you.”

  “The union—it didn’t sound like they were uneducated. I mean, you have a constitution.”

  “Yeah, well, there’s education and there’s education. For every kid at that meeting there are twenty, thirty more that can’t even say ‘constitution.’” He looked away for a few moments, then shrugged. “Some of us try to teach them, but—”

  “What were you doing under my window the other day?”

  “Hmm? Oh. Nothing. Coincidence, I guarantee. I was there to meet someone else. You just happened to drop by.” He smiled at his own poor joke. “As for tonight, well, I followed you. A friend of mine has a car, and I sat outside the jail till you came out, then waited at the house. I didn’t know what to expect. I certainly didn’t think it’d be your dad coming to pick you up. That was him, right? Anyway, we followed, so this time wasn’t coincidence.”