Asimov's SF, October-November 2008 Read online

  Halfway across the living room of his tiny apartment in the Assisted Living Facility, something happened in Henry's mind.

  He stopped, astonished. It had felt like a tentative touch, a ghostly finger inside his brain. Astonishment was immediately replaced by fear. Was he having a stroke? At ninety, anything was possible. But he felt fine, better in fact than for several days. Not a stroke. So what—

  “Dr. Erdmann?”

  “I'm here.” He clunked to the door and opened it. Carrie wore a cherry red sweater, a fallen orange leaf caught on her hat, and sunglasses. Such a pretty girl, all bronze hair and bright skin and vibrant color. Outside it was drizzling. Henry reached out and gently removed the sunglasses. Carrie's left eye was swollen and discolored, the iris and pupil invisible under the outraged flesh.

  “The bastard,” Henry said.

  * * * *

  That was Henry and Carrie going down the hall toward the elevator, thought Evelyn Krenchnoted. She waved from her armchair, her door wide open as always, but they were talking and didn't notice. She strained to hear, but just then another plane went overhead from the airport. Those pesky flight paths were too near St. Sebastian's! On the other hand, if they weren't, Evelyn couldn't afford to live here. Always look on the bright side!

  Since this was Tuesday afternoon, Carrie and Henry were undoubtedly going to the college. So wonderful the way Henry kept busy—you'd never guess his real age, that was for sure. He even had all his hair! Although that jacket was too light for September, and not waterproof. Henry might catch cold. She would speak to Carrie about it. And why was Carrie wearing sunglasses when it was raining?

  But if Evelyn didn't start her phone calls, she would be late! People were depending on her! She keyed in the first number, listened to it ring one floor below. “Bob? It's Evelyn. Now, dear, tell me—how's your blood pressure today?”

  “Fine,” Bob Donovan said.

  “Are you sure? You sound a bit grumpy, dear.”

  “I'm fine, Evelyn. I'm just busy.”

  “Oh, that's good! With what?”

  “Just busy.”

  “Always good to keep busy! Are you coming to Current Affairs tonight?”

  “Dunno.”

  “You should. You really should. Intellectual stimulation is so important for people our age!”

  “Gotta go,” Bob grunted.

  “Certainly, but first, how did your granddaughter do with—”

  He'd hung up. Really, very grumpy. Maybe he was having problems with irregularity. Evelyn would recommend a high colonic.

  Her next call was more responsive. Gina Martinelli was, as always, thrilled with Evelyn's attention. She informed Gina minutely about the state of her arthritis, her gout, her diabetes, her son's weight problem, her other son's wife's step-daughter's miscarriage, all interspersed with quotations from the Bible ("’ Take a little wine for thy stomach'—First Timothy.") She answered all Evelyn's questions and wrote down all her recommendations and—

  “Evelyn?” Gina said. “Are you still there?”

  “Yes, I—” Evelyn fell silent, an occurrence so shocking that Gina gasped, “Hit your panic button!”

  “No, no, I'm fine, I ... I just remembered something for a moment.”

  “Remembered something? What?”

  But Evelyn didn't know. It hadn't been a memory, exactly, it had been a ... what? A feeling, a vague but somehow strong sensation of ... something.

  “Evelyn?”

  “I'm here!”

  “The Lord decides when to call us home, and I guess it's not your time yet. Did you hear about Anna Chernov? That famous ballet dancer on Four? She fell last night and broke her leg and they had to move her to the Infirmary.”

  “No!”

  “Yes, poor thing. They say it's only temporary, until they get her stabilized, but you know what that means.”

  She did. They all did. First the Infirmary, then up to Seven, where you didn't even have your own little apartment any more, and eventually to Nursing on Eight and Nine. Better to go quick and clean, like Jed Fuller last month. But Evelyn wasn't going to let herself think like that! A positive attitude was so important!

  Gina said, “Anna is doing pretty well, I hear. The Lord never sends more than a person can bear.”

  Evelyn wasn't so sure about that, but it never paid to argue with Gina, who was convinced that she had God on redial. Evelyn said, “I'll visit her before the Stitch ‘n Bitch meeting. I'm sure she'll want company. Poor girl—you know, those dancers, they just abuse their health for years and years, so what can you expect?”

  “I know!” Gina said, not without satisfaction. “They pay a terrible price for beauty. It's a little vain, actually.”

  “Did you hear about that necklace she has in the St. Sebastian's safe?”

  “No! What necklace?”

  “A fabulous one! Doris Dziwalski told me. It was given to Anna by some famous Russian dancer who was given it by the czar!”

  “What czar?”

  “The czar! You know, of Russia. Doris said it's worth a fortune and that's why it's in the safe. Anna never wears it.”

  “Vanity,” Gina said. “She probably doesn't like the way it looks now against her wrinkly neck.”

  “Doris said Anna's depressed.”

  “No, it's vanity. ‘Lo, I looked and saw that all was—'”

  “I'll recommend acupuncture to her,” Evelyn interrupted. “Acupuncture is good for depression.” But first she'd call Erin, to tell her the news.

  * * * *

  Erin Bass let the phone ring. It was probably that tiresome bore Evelyn Krenchnoted, eager to check on Erin's blood pressure or her cholesterol or her Islets of Langerhans. Oh, Erin should answer the phone, there was no harm in the woman, Erin should be more charitable. But why? Why should one have to be more charitable just because one was old?

  She let the phone ring and returned to her book, Graham Greene's The Heart of the Matter. Greene's world-weary despair was a silly affectation but he was a wonderful writer, and too much underrated nowadays.

  The liner came in on a Saturday evening: from the bedroom window they could see its long grey form steal past the boom, beyond the—

  Something was happening.

  —steal past the boom, beyond the—

  Erin was no longer in St. Sebastian's, she was nowhere, she was lifted away from everything, she was beyond the—

  Then it was over and she sat again in her tiny apartment, the book sliding unheeded off her lap.

  * * * *

  Anna Chernov was dancing. She and Paul stood with two other couples on the stage, under the bright lights. Balanchine himself stood in the second wing, and even though Anna knew he was there to wait for Suzanne's solo, his presence inspired her. The music began. Promenade en couronne, attitude, arabesque efface and into the lift, Paul's arms raising her. She was lifted out of herself and then she was soaring above the stage, over the heads of the corps de ballet, above Suzanne Farrell herself, soaring through the roof of the New York State Theater and into the night sky, spreading her arms in a porte de bras wide enough to take in the glittering night sky, soaring in the most perfect jete in the universe, until...

  * * * *

  “She's smiling,” Bob Donovan said, before he knew he was going to speak at all. He looked down at the sleeping Anna, so beautiful she didn't even look real, except for the leg in its big ugly cast. In one hand, feeling like a fool but what the fuck, he held three yellow roses.

  “The painkillers do that sometimes,” the Infirmary nurse said. “I'm afraid you can't stay, Mr. Donovan.”

  Bob scowled at her. But it wasn't like he meant it or anything. This nurse wasn't so bad. Not like some. Maybe because she wasn't any spring chicken herself. A few more years, sister, and you'll be here right with us.

  “Give her these, okay?” He thrust the roses at the nurse.

  “I will, yes,” she said, and he walked out of the medicine-smelling Infirmary—he hated that smell—back t
o the elevator. Christ, what a sorry old fart he was. Anna Chernov, that nosy old broad Evelyn Krenchnoted once told him, used to dance at some famous place in New York, Abraham Center or something. Anna had been famous. But Evelyn could be wrong, and anyway it didn't matter. From the first moment Bob Donovan laid eyes on Anna Chernov, he'd wanted to give her things. Flowers. Jewelry. Anything she wanted. Anything he had. And how stupid and fucked-up was that, at his age? Give me a break!

  He took the elevator to the first floor, stalked savagely through the lobby, and went out the side door to the “remembrance garden.” Stupid name, New Age-y stupid. He wanted to kick something, wanted to bellow for—

  Energy punched through him, from the base of his spine up his back and into his brain, mild but definite, like a shock from a busted toaster or something. Then it was gone.

  What the fuck was that? Was he okay? If he fell, like Anna—

  He was okay. He didn't have Anna's thin delicate bones. Whatever it was, was gone now. Just one of those things.

  * * * *

  On a Nursing floor of St. Sebastian's, a woman with just a few days to live muttered in her long, last half-sleep. An IV dripped morphine into her arm, easing the passage. No one listened to the mutterings; it had been years since they'd made sense. For a moment she stopped and her eyes, again bright in the ravaged face that had once been so lovely, grew wide. But for only a moment. Her eyes closed and the mindless muttering resumed.

  * * * *

  In Tijuana, a vigorous old man sitting behind his son's market stall, where he sold cheap serapes to jabbering turistas, suddenly lifted his face to the sun. His mouth, which still had all its white flashing teeth, made a big O.

  * * * *

  In Bombay, a widow dressed in white looked out her window at the teeming streets, her face gone blank as her sari.

  * * * *

  In Chengdu, a monk sitting on his cushion on the polished floor of the meditation room in the ancient Wenshu Monastery, shattered the holy silence with a shocking, startled laugh.

  * * * *

  TWO

  Carrie Vesey sat in the back of Dr. Erdmann's classroom and thought about murder.

  Not that she would ever do it, of course. Murder was wrong. Taking a life filled her with horror that was only—

  Ground-up castor beans were a deadly poison.

  —made worse by her daily witnessing of old people's aching desire to hold onto life. Also, she—

  Her step-brother had once shown her how to disable the brakes on a car.

  —knew she wasn't the kind of person who solved problems that boldly. And anyway her—

  The battered-woman defense almost always earned acquittal from juries.

  —lawyer said that a paper trail of restraining orders and ER documentation was by far the best way to—

  If a man was passed out from a dozen beers, he'd never feel a bullet from his own service revolver.

  —put Jim behind bars legally. That, the lawyer said, “would solve the problem"—as if a black eye and a broken arm and constant threats that left her scared even when Jim wasn't in the same city were all just a theoretical “problem,” like the ones Dr. Erdmann gave his physics students.

  He sat on top of a desk in the front of the room, talking about something called the “Bose-Einstein condensate.” Carrie had no idea what that was, and she didn't care. She just liked being here, sitting unheeded in the back of the room. The physics students, nine boys and two girls, were none of them interested in her presence, her black eye, or her beauty. When Dr. Erdmann was around, he commanded all their geeky attention, and that was indescribably restful. Carrie tried—unsuccessfully, she knew—to hide her beauty. Her looks had brought her nothing but trouble: Gary, Eric, Jim. So now she wore baggy sweats and no make-up, and crammed her twenty-four-carat-gold hair under a shapeless hat. Maybe if she was as smart as these students she would have learned to pick a different kind of man, but she wasn't, and she hadn't, and Dr. Erdmann's classroom was a place she felt safe. Safer, even, than St. Sebastian's, which was where Jim had blackened her eye.

  He'd slipped in through the loading dock, she guessed, and caught her alone in the linens supply closet. He was gone after one punch, and when she called her exasperated lawyer and he found out she had no witnesses and St. Sebastian's had “security,” he'd said there was nothing he could do. It would be her word against Jim's. She had to be able to prove that the restraining order had been violated.

  Dr. Erdmann was talking about “proof,” too: some sort of mathematical proof. Carrie had been good at math, in high school. Only Dr. Erdmann had said once that what she'd done in high school wasn't “mathematics,” only “arithmetic.” “Why didn't you go to college, Carrie?” he'd asked.

  “No money,” she said in a tone that meant: Please don't ask anything else. She just hadn't felt up to explaining about Daddy and the alcoholism and the debts and her abusive step-brothers, and Dr. Erdmann hadn't asked. He was sensitive that way.

  Looking at his tall, stooped figure sitting on the desk, his walker close to hand, Carrie sometimes let herself dream that Dr. Erdmann—Henry—was fifty years younger. Forty to her twenty-eight—that would work. She'd Googled a picture of him at that age, when he'd been working at someplace called the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory. He'd been handsome, dark-haired, smiling into the camera next to his wife, Ida. She hadn't been as pretty as Carrie, but she'd gone to college, so even if Carrie had been born back then, she wouldn't have had a chance with him. Story of her life.

  “—have any questions?” Dr. Erdmann finished.

  The students did—they always did—clamoring to be heard, not raising their hands, interrupting each other. But when Dr. Erdmann spoke, immediately they all shut up. Someone leapt up to write equations on the board. Dr. Erdmann slowly turned his frail body to look at them. The discussion went on a long time, almost as long as the class. Carrie fell asleep.

  When she woke, it was to Dr. Erdmann, leaning on his walker, gently jiggling her shoulder. “Carrie?”

  “Oh! Oh, I'm sorry!”

  “Don't be. We bored you to death, poor child.”

  “No! I loved it!”

  He raised his eyebrows and she felt shamed. He thought she was telling a polite lie, and he had very little tolerance for lies. But the truth is, she always loved being here.

  Outside, it was full dark. The autumn rain had stopped and the unseen ground had that mysterious, fertile smell of wet leaves. Carrie helped Dr. Erdmann into her battered Toyota and slid behind the wheel. As they started back toward St. Sebastian's, she could tell that he was exhausted. Those students asked too much of him! It was enough that he taught one advanced class a week, sharing all that physics, without them also demanding he—

  “Dr. Erdmann?”

  For a long terrible moment she thought he was dead. His head lolled against the seat but he wasn't asleep: His open eyes rolled back into his head. Carrie jerked the wheel to the right and slammed the Toyota alongside the curb. He was still breathing.

  “Dr. Erdmann? Henry?”

  Nothing. Carrie dove into her purse, fumbling for her cell phone. Then it occurred to her that his panic button would be faster. She tore open the buttons on his jacket; he wasn't wearing the button. She scrambled again for the purse, starting to sob.

  “Carrie?”

  He was sitting up now, a shadowy figure. She hit the overhead light. His face, a fissured landscape, looked dazed and pale. His pupils were huge.

  “What happened? Tell me.” She tried to keep her voice even, to observe everything, because it was important to be able to make as full a report as possible to Dr. Jamison. But her hand clutched at his sleeve.

  He covered her fingers with his. His voice sounded dazed. “I ... don't know. I was ... somewhere else?”

  “A stroke?” That was what they were all afraid of. Not death, but to be incapacitated, reduced to partiality. And for Dr. Erdmann, with his fine mind...

  “No.” He sounded definite. �
��Something else. I don't know. Did you call 911 yet?”

  The cell phone lay inert in her hand. “No, not yet, there wasn't time for—”

  “Then don't. Take me home.”

  “All right, but you're going to see the doctor as soon as we get there.” She was pleased, despite everything, with her firm tone.

  “It's seven-thirty. They'll all have gone home.”

  But they hadn't. As soon as Carrie and Dr. Erdmann walked into the lobby, she saw a man in a white coat standing by the elevators. “Wait!” she called, loud enough that several people turned to look, evening visitors and ambulatories and a nurse Carrie didn't know. She didn't know the doctor, either, but she rushed over to him, leaving Dr. Erdmann leaning on his walker by the main entrance.

  “Are you a doctor? I'm Carrie Vesey and I was bringing Dr. Erdmann—a patient, Henry Erdmann, not a medical doctor—home when he had some kind of attack, he seems all right now but someone needs to look at him, he says—”

  “I'm not an M.D.,” the man said, and Carrie looked at him in dismay. “I'm a neurological researcher.”

  She rallied. “Well, you're the best we're going to get at this hour so please look at him!” She was amazed at her own audacity.

  “All right.” He followed her to Dr. Erdmann, who scowled because, Carrie knew, he hated this sort of fuss. The non-M.D. seemed to pick up on that right away. He said pleasantly, “Dr. Erdmann? I'm Jake DiBella. Will you come this way, sir?” Without waiting for an answer, he turned and led the way down a side corridor. Carrie and Dr. Erdmann followed, everybody's walk normal, but still people watched. Move along, nothing to see here ... why were they still staring? Why were people such ghouls?

  But they weren't, really. That was just her own fear talking.

  You trust too much, Carrie, Dr. Erdmann had said just last week.

  In a small room on the second floor, he sat heavily on one of the three metal folding chairs. The room held the chairs, a gray filing cabinet, an ugly metal desk, and nothing else. Carrie, a natural nester, pursed her lips, and this Dr. DiBella caught that, too.

  “I've only been here a few days,” he said apologetically. “Haven't had time yet to properly move in. Dr. Erdmann, can you tell me what happened?”