Orbit 18

by Damon Knight

  What a day to have to go to the goddam store! I had half forgotten, half repressed the idea, and Betty pointed to the boldly circled date on the calendar, giving me a sweet look that seemed to connote sadness, encouragement, and secret promises of intimacies to be shared when I returned. She kissed me skilfully, and an urgency in her brief writhing both pleased and puzzled me. The wine was sweet and nourishing on her lips. I did not notice Alex and Sandra exchanging expectant glances. Bill had gone to break out our outdoor clothing.

  I left Betty and Alex and Sandra together, and Bill and I made ready for the bothersome monthly chore of getting food rations at the commissary. I went quickly to the basement, almost as if this were something I would have to do quickly or not at all. Bill and I put on plastic body-suits over the several layers of clothes we always wore, then hefted the heavy hooded parkas from their nails and helped each other put them on. Then we put on snowshoes, opened the garage door, quickly shoveled the steaming dog turds outside, and watched the dogs charge into the three-foot-high snow, barking excitedly, leaping and thrashing, pawing and rearing. We got them back inside and tried the snow-crust ourselves. Immediately our shoes cracked the crust to a depth of about two inches, the wetness froze in my nostrils, and my eyes felt like iced marbles in warm plastic sacs. The silence was incredible, a cotton-muffled aura of urgently compacted oxygen molecules. We knew it was useless to talk—we had made a few bad-weather trips before—so we just paced the snow as best we could, thankful for our ski masks and rubber gloves and for the strength of our relative youth. The fence-gate was damn hard to open enough for us to squeeze through, and we tried to sift flowingly over the snow, but a moderate trudging was what we got, moving unsteadily up the driveway toward the street, two padded figures on a sea of glistening white, metal fences beside us, behind us, in front of us, the fences providing stark, gridlike reference points. We turned left down the steep street and met Macy. He was carrying his chihuahua in a sling around his neck, and the tiny animal looked utterly hairless and vulnerable, trembling, an all but in utero look. Of all the great good luck, a municipal snow plow came grinding up the road, diesel engine screaming, its chute spewing huge fans of snow into the air. “Good Gawdamighty,” Macy said, “will you looky thar—sent straight from heaven above.”

  “Couldn’t have come at a better time,” I agreed heartily. “Now maybe we can get a jump on the crowds at the store.” We struggled down into the wide trench the plow had made and looked far down the road toward the shopping center. We might easily have been birds standing in deep tire tracks in the snow, except I hadn’t seen a bird or a tire track for months. We took our snowshoes off and began to jog lightly down the road. Dirty, ragged, padded figures fought their way through the deep snow toward the cleared trench, all of us seeking the hard surface the plow had made. Sappenfield wore his Bowie knife and his pistol, fat little Hauser was being dragged by his Doberman, Hanson had a beard that looked like a five-year collection of steel wool and gritty dirt, and I’ll be damned if six-foot-tall Ms. Marr wasn’t out. Her husband stayed drunk most of the time. We began to come together in the trench, a loose crowd, like a golf-course gallery moving across the greens. A Peugeot diesel came slowly down the trench, stopped for one or two minutes, and was surrounded by people wanting to warm their hands on the hood. One man lay on the ground to press his hand against the muffler and resonator. Macy’s eyebrows were laced with icicles, and he complained that his chewing tobacco was cold in his mouth. We made it to the main access road in about one hour, then turned wearily to starboard and trudged along the turnpike. Both lanes had been cleared, and some sleighs and troikas jingled by, pulled by skinny, bloat-bellied horses, plumes of steam pumping from their nostrils. A peat-burning Fiat whispered past, followed by a brace of Honda Civitinos and a rare Subaru. Cars were rare in our neighborhood, and very few large vehicles existed at all except in museums or among the millions of cars abandoned on the streets. We passed vandalized houses, crumbling business booths, fellatio kiosks, and the remains of MacDonald's, Dairy Queen, Royal Laundry, Majik Market, Dinkle’s Bakery, Seth’s Clothing Store, Harry’s Book and Tape Nook, Levitt Shoe Store, Pressley’s Hardware, Gazebo Fashions for Ladies, B 8c G Cafeteria—all long since bankrupt in the financial riots of 1980, looted, vandalized, abandoned, then squattered, fought over, burned, and grown up in weeds, later pulled from the ground for food and fuel. Now it all lay buried under the merciful snow. Autos lay three and four deep in service stations, a Lotus perched curiously atop a Continental, the tiny car’s height approximately doubled by the snow accumulation. Deep in the shallow bowl that had been a shopping mall, hundreds of abandoned cars lay beneath the snow. A large helicopter lay in their midst, one rotor snapped and sagging. Someone had a good fire going in the center of the lot, and there were some luxurious hovels fashioned from 450 SEs and Imperials.

  We pushed our way into the commissary, a low metal building that had once housed the Social Security Administration, and glanced anxiously at the names on the allocation charts. This was the right day for us to show up, but the errors in allocation schedules were numerous and frustrating. A squad of provost robots scuttled from wall niches and barked strange little metallic-voiced orders for us to form six parallel lines to the counters where we would receive our rations. We moved fast, getting out our credit-line vouchers and readying our satchels and knapsacks and plastibags. Bleary-eyed clerks activated the credit-control registers, the robots queued up the lines carefully and started checking our voucher cards. Behind the row of clerks, the larder allocation tapes began to clack and spin, and the tiny, precious, compressed nutrient cubes clittered from the slots and into stiff, cold, dirty hands and all manner of sacks and boxes and containers:

  BOBBITT, HAROLD E: 150 UNITS EQUINE MEAT, 75 SOYA BY-PRODUCTS, 10 VEGETABLE SURROGATES, 1 FIFTH LIQUOR

  CARTER, BENJAMIN: 62 UNITS RICE PRODUCTS, 400 UNITS DRY DOG MEAL, 4 QUARTS BRASS MONKEY

  HAINEY, GAITHER: 2 ISSUES PHEASANT UNDER GLASS, 2 UNITS SPINACH LEAVES, 3 UNITS BRANDY, 1 UNIT CREPES

  SHAWN, JACK: 40 UNITS VODKA—

  “Say, who the hell is Gaither Hainey?” old McDonough asked me from behind, a hellish black stogie jammed in his mouth, grinning with his sharp yellow canines exposed. A man in front of us told him that Hainey was a former textile millionaire who spent his monthly allowance on gourmet cubes and somehow survived thirty days on rations most people would use up in one week. Old Ms. Malone looked prim and clean as usual, waiting for her apricot brandy vials and protein blastulas, and I doffed my ski mask to her. Bailey had a new bandage on his leathery face. He was a retired gladiator, and still challenged young men to duels. The room grew noisy and incredibly odorous, the doors opened to admit bone-chilling air and closed to capture the kaleidoscope of olfactory cues, one balancing the other. People hugged their rations to themselves, hid them in belts and pockets and mittens, and looked suspiciously at those waiting as they left. Flimflams, trades, and outright assaults and thefts were not unusual on allocation days. There were always a few people around who needed rations and would prey upon those who might be easy pickings. The clerk looked at my voucher matter-of-factly and even managed a smile—damn, I was caught off guard—people smiled so little these days. I managed a feeble return smile as the tapes reeled off our allocations:

  BARTON, HENRY: 30 UNITS PORK, 15 UNITS VENISON, 15 UNITS STARFISH, 30 units tubers, 30 units truffles (truffles were common, what with millions of old trees being uprooted) 51 units ragweed stalks

  The cubes clattered from the chutes and Bill and I caught them in our knapsacks. As we turned to leave, Bill traded a tuber cube for a real peppermint stick an old man must have been saving for years. Old Bill Gain traded his entire ration of grits and eggs for tequila blatters and intravenes.

  I knew things couldn’t keep going smooth for very long. Tom Varner stepped in front of us as we approached the door, blocking it, feet wide, arms akimbo. As usual, he wanted to bump somebody, and he was still sore because
Alex and I double-teamed him back in October. I could feel Bill tense up beside me, and I tried not even to break stride as we neared him. I said, "Let’s take him!” in a quick, harsh whisper. We got him from both sides, thrusting our arms through his, and his fat-tomato face came apart in a flaccid autonomic droop, his fighting response just barely muffled by the ease and surprise of the attack. We dragged him stiff-legged, like policemen hustling a demonstrator toward a paddy wagon, and rammed his salt-and-pepper head against the corrugated metal wall. Goddam, you would have thought a truck had hit the wall, it made a hell of a noise, but didn’t do much damage to Tom. Bill chopped him behind the ear and that put him to sleep. Sam Balias cheered; he hated Tom’s bully-guts, and so did most people who knew him. One of the provost robots castered over to us at once, requesting retinograph tapes of the incident. Big deal—citizens had long ago realized that they had to rely on themselves for protection; now we were about to be detained for roughing up one of the community bad guys. Sam left his place in line to speak loudly in our defense. He bonded himself in our advocacy, and fluxed on his I.D. beside ours on the warrant: CITIZEN VARNER VIOLATED PUBLIC SPACE AND MADE A PROVOCATIVE MOVE, the warrant read—shit, men had drawn pistols over lesser matters. About half the people in our neighborhood carried sidearms.

  “Kin ah hev his snuff?” old Jock Tait asked the provobot, reaching for Tom’s vest pocket. Before the bot could muster a response, Jock had the small bag open and slipped a pinch of the snuff under his lip. Of all the crazy things, somebody started playing the Variations on the Star-Spangled Banner, full volume, on a portable cassette player, and I remembered the stories about circus musicians playing Stars and Stripes Forever when trouble started on the midway. Bill and I tended briefly to Tom, who seemed not to know what the hell was going on—“Stand at attention, you shitheads,” he muttered, “hit’s the national fuckin’ anthem—” We decided to leave before Tom recovered his senses. The Judicial Bank would process the case. If we lost, our food rations would be reduced. If we won, nothing would happen. Poor Tom: like most of the gladiator types, he had nothing to do with his aggression; it was a maladaptive trait pattern.

  Outside again, the afternoon sunlight was blinding. We tied the sacks around our necks and walked, heads low, eyes closed to slits, shutting out as much of the whiteness as we could. Bill held both hands over his eyes and I guided him about halfway home, then I closed my eyes and he guided me. The sun was white-hot, murderous in its light, yet giving us little respite from the bitter cold air that penetrated us like embalming fluid. Abreast of our street, we floundered up out of the street-wide trench, and made it the last hundred or so difficult yards to our house, opening the garage door, hugging the warm dogs, and cheering loudly. Above our heads, the huge bed squeaked through the floor, and we heard soft laughter, then loud greeting cheers from Betty and Alex and Sandra.

  Betty looked marvelous, her face flushed, lips ripe. Sandra also looked good, somehow excited, blooming, humid, achingly sexual, I thought. And then, by damn, Alex looked like a bull with his cows, and I suddenly realized, just as clear as day, that these three loved ones had been at each other sexually. At first I resented being away, freezing my ass off, while they were plowing each other, but then I thought, this is the ultimate familial bond, and I was happy for them. I didn’t know what to do or say at the time, so I just coasted mentally and acted relaxed and happy and tired. After we divided the food rations, we all drank wine, sat in a tight circle, and Sandra leaned across and kissed me earnestly. Then she kissed Bill and Alex and Betty, and we all hugged each other. Alex brought a prized old cedar log, topped it with pine slabs, and set a fine, roaring blast going in the fireplace. As if some collective sense of exquisite imminence motivated us, we made breathless tropistic movements toward group sex, the growing darkness helping Bill and me past our inhibitions. I all but sobbed with joy as Bill mounted Betty, ventral over dorsal, Sandra guiding his glistening mallet to its target beautifully. Later, our beautiful children sang, and stroked Betty and me as we performed a long, ritualistic pas d deux. Through the early-evening hours, we all put our mouths and hands and genitals wherever the urge moved us, and it was a beautiful scene. I had never been happier, and I began to think that incest should be the true theme for the Madonna and Child paradigms, the parent rewarding the child with the gift of patient, gentle sexual initiation. How quickly our taboos left us!

  Late that evening we ate, slowly, ritualistically, luxuriating in the warm emotionality of our incestuous circle. We took a taper to our bedroom and took successive spoon positions on the bed. I put a sheepdog next to Bill, Betty clung to Bill’s back, then Alex slipped in next to Betty. Sandra moved to embrace Alex from behind, and I put the other warm dog next to Sandra. Sandra looked disappointed, but the dog seemed to whimper in satisfaction. Bill and I pulled the stitched impala skins up to cover us all, and we settled into readiness for sleep.

  I knew that bittersweet times were ahead for us all. Bill and Alex were far better calisthenic screwers than I was, and sooner or later a pecking order would develop. I just hoped that our love for each other would smooth things out, but then, who is to say that love is anything other than a set of full seminal vesicles, or some vague estrogenic rumbling of the pelvic floor? But we had good signals so far. Christ, the warmth of the body is a holy thing. The room will probably go to 50° tonight, maybe zero in the garage, and twenty below outside. Maybe a dozen citizens will freeze to death tonight. At least I won’t have to go to the store again until February 21, 1986—thank God for that—hey, Sandra is reaching for me, such a sweet child—I know we’ll make it through the winter.

  THE TEACHER

  Not everybody who hears voices is insane.

  Kathleen M. Sidney

  Grasping the iron railing with both hands, the bridge vibrating beneath her feet, she paused to watch the river. For at least an hour now she had walked with her eyes and mind unfocused. But at last the sheer power of the river fixed her attention. If she could only think only of the force of the water only of the water only . . .

  Here at the city’s highest point the river cut a deep chasm through the rock and rushed over a fifty-foot cliff with such velocity that it formed a great frothing arc. The late-afternoon sun slanted through the spray where its colors broke apart into a clearly defined bow. And beneath that?

  She took off her glasses to wipe away the spray. A little farther on there was a footbridge that crossed directly over the rim of the falls and led to a small park. The benches looked inviting. She became aware of pain in her arthritic knee. It must have been hurting for some time to get this bad. She put her glasses back on and looked again, finally squinting. Yes, something, a kind of shapeless fluctuation of colors beneath the rainbow—maybe an afterimage formed from staring too long at the sun glaring off the water, or a prismatic effect blurred by the mist.

  Strange, but no more important really than silver-backed clouds blown across a deep-blue sky. She looked at her hands and thought it strange that they were old.

  “Mrs. Lockwood, please, can’t you understand?” Reese had handed her his handkerchief, all the while speaking tenderly, like a father to a child. And he not more than forty, while she—did he know that she was nearing her seventy-fifth birthday?

  Halfway across the footbridge she remembered the colors and looked again. The rainbow was invisible from this angle, and the colors were hidden by the spray.

  The bench was hard and her knee went on throbbing. There was something that she should do (there was always something) but she didn’t try to remember what it was. It hurt to think, and there was the water, only the water.

  From here she could see the rock basin at the bottom of the falls where the river swirled through a half-circle and then went on. A narrow footpath bordered the basin and ended at a concrete wall where the stairs led back up the cliff. Two children were down there, leaning precariously over the railing. Their distance and the spray from the falls made it difficult for her to see th
em, but she thought that one might be a girl and the other a boy.

  She must have stood in just that spot many times as a child. She and Paul, watching the water. (The children leaped away from the railing and raced along the path toward the stairs.) Of course there hadn’t been stairs then. And the wall? No, it couldn’t have been there either, because the only way of getting to the path had been around the side of the factory. She wondered how much else along the river had changed since that day, almost sixty-five years ago, when she and Paul had decided to walk to the ocean. They had known that the Lenape River ended there. It was only a matter of following it. She could still picture the ocean. Not the one that was sixty miles east of Lenape Falls. Not the one that they would never visit until they were much older and it didn’t really matter anymore. But the one that they had carried with them, past smokestacks, oil tanks, and dead things floating in the water, until it was night.

  The throbbing in her knee was getting worse. She had better take some aspirin as soon as she got home. Home. She looked at her watch and, with that habitual motion, remembered.

  “How long do I have?”

  “Well, as it happens, we already have someone in mind.”

  “I believe the standard procedure is two months’ notice.”

  Such a slick young man, his hair and clothes styled ingeniously between establishment and mod. Yet now he seemed genuinely embarrassed. “That’s only for contract teachers.”

  4:05. She should have caught the 3:15 bus home. Emma would be wondering why she was late. There might be a 4:20. She got up stiffly and crossed the bridge, feeling somehow not quite ready to leave the park. It was as if there was something that she had meant to finish first. Maybe a thought. Or a question.