Orbit 15 - [Anthology] Read online

  Tuesday. As soon as I got to my resting booth, I knew I was in for a bellyache. I hadn’t slept hardly any. The sidewalks were wet and hot, people were all over the place, the sun was a furnace, I was already sweaty, the stalls stunk to high heaven, my belly was killing me. Back in my mind, some idiot said over and over again, “Lydon, Lydon, Lydon.”

  “Why don’t you go to hell?” I yelled.

  He came out of his booth, walked to the curb, stopped. I walked to my curb, stopped. We stared across the wet street at each other. All I could see were his eyes. They went all the way down into my soul and back out again, taking my guts with them. He smiled. My belly turned over. I smiled. How serious were we that morning, two dunderheads glaring at each other as if the life we were waiting for had suddenly materialized between us. A yearning in my throat, I said, “Lydon.”

  “Vega.” He was hurting. So was I. Neither of us knew the truth. There wasn’t anyone else in the world. The planet was ours, and our togetherness tore both of us to tatters, and it was the most glorious pain there could be. I wanted to be a worm clinging to his skin. That way he couldn’t leave me. I’d be hanging onto him, secretly, and he’d take me with him wherever he went.

  The sun was hot between us. I had a headache.

  “Vega.”

  The way he said it made me smile again, but my face felt as if it were going to crack. I was so happy I wanted to cry, and then I did cry a few minutes later, because Lydon didn’t come across the street to me. He started to; I know that was what he intended, but he never made it. His smile was like mine, simply there to dress up a naked face, and he put one foot down onto the street, with the other foot ready to follow. His hands were stretched out toward me.

  All of a sudden his face turned purple. His feet stopped moving. His body froze. His expression deadened. He turned and walked over to one of the stalls. He slammed through the door.

  I bawled my eyes out. I sat on the curb and waited for him to come out so that he would see my rage. I wanted to kill him with my anger. He didn’t see it. After the longest time, he popped out of the stall and ran down the street at high speed.

  At three in the morning I woke up in my one-room home. Dry-eyed, I didn’t fight the chunk of my brain that had developed during the past weeks. Some gift. It was a chunk of a man named Lydon. Consider him. Monster. Nothing but a beef pumper, same as everybody. Rather do that than . . . what?

  What if Lydon had no mind? Say he was just a man with no will, and he was with me alone somewhere, and I could do anything to him that I wanted? Consider it. Lydon, you were so sweet. What would I do to you? You wear too many clothes. How can I see you that way? You’re skin all over, and I want to look at all of it. I take off your shirt. Just as I thought; you give me a bellyache. Common, ordinary back and chest. Let me put my lips between your shoulderblades. They aren’t common if they make me want to do that. Now, Lydon, puppet man, take off your pants. Not too fast, as I’m getting ill. Wait a minute, let me kiss your mouth, because I may never get around to it later. There he is, Lydon is naked as a jaybird, and since I read all that porno I know all about men.

  I have made a mistake. All I intended to do was look at him.

  It was four in the morning, and I came stumbling from one of my stalls. I didn’t remember getting out of bed and going there, didn’t remember walking through the rain. But I knew what I had done inside the stall. The first time, and now I was really sick. It had taken about fifty seconds to do the job, and I hated it. I was a monster like everyone else.

  Someone came out of a stall across the street. It was Lydon. He saw me and ran away. I sat down on the curb and cried. The past came back to me, haunted me. Now I remembered what they had done to me in the Conditioning Center.

  “When you hear the sound of the bell, your physical desire will be focused. You will step inside a stall and bring yourself to orgasm. You are promised a rich, full sexual life. No urge must be ignored. Sexual activity in private quarters is evil. Desire is unfocused. Sexual activity between two people is evil. Desire is unfocused. The masturbation stalls are public facilities built for your use. You have nothing to hide. Your neighbors can see that you have nothing to hide. Sex and the stalls are united in your mind. There cannot be the first without the second. First comes desire. Without the sound of the bell, desire remains unfocused. You will not be deprived of pleasure, as the sound of the bell can be heard when you pass the stalls. First comes desire. Remember that it is unfocused without the sound of the bell. Remember that the sound comes from the stalls. You must go to the stalls. When you hear the sound of the bell . . . desire is focused . . . evil is sex with another ... no such thing as private love or sex, as you can’t be trusted to obey if you are hidden away from the eyes of the world . . . someone might be with you and you might be tempted . . . rich, full life . . . many orgasms mean lack of tension and happiness . . . sex like stepping into public toilet . . . so sorry, but you’ve such a ravenous appetite . . . you won’t be able to talk about it because your head will hurt . . . sound of bell in your head . . . not real . . . your id clamoring . . . oh, how I need a good one, or, it’s a nice day and I feel energetic and mellow, oops, there goes the bell, better hop inside and enjoy my rich, full . . . that man I saw, he makes my id clamor, oops, where’s the bell, where’s the bell, where’s the ... he does me like no other, and all my life there will be men who send me speeding to the stalls, why don’t they just cut out our eyes . . . one day I saw a human being who had the average complement of qualities, except that God meant for him to be meaningful to me, and my hands and my mind reached out for him and when I grasped him because I had to I found not him but a bell and it rang not in my hands but in my head and I wanted to scream because . . .”

  It was true that the bell sounded only in my head, because never in my life did I ever hear it ring.

  Sunup and I came out of a stall, and there was Permilia walking toward me. She had an axe in her hand. She went inside a stall. I heard a strange sound, and she walked outside and let the blood from the stump of her wrist leak into the gutter. Across the street, Lydon stood on the curb, crying.

  “I love you, Vega,” he said and went into a stall.

  “I love you, Lydon,” I said and went into a stall.

  <>

  ~ * ~

  WHERE LATE THE SWEET BIRDS SANG

  Kate Wilhelm

  Arise, cry out in the night: in the beginning of the watches

  pour out thine heart like water before the

  face of the Lord: lift up thy hands toward him for

  the life of thy young children, that faint for hunger

  in the top of every street.

  ~ * ~

  What David always hated most about the Sumner family dinners was the way everyone talked about him as if he were not there.

  “Has he been eating enough meat lately? He looks peaked.”

  “You spoil him, Carrie. If he won’t eat his dinner, don’t let him go out and play. You were like that, you know.”

  “When I was his age, I was husky enough to cut down a tree with a hatchet. He couldn’t cut his way out of a fog.”

  David would imagine himself invisible, floating unseen over their heads as they discussed him. Someone would ask if he had a girl friend yet, and they would tsk-tsk whether the answer was yes or no. From his vantage point he would aim a ray gun at Uncle Clarence, whom he especially disliked because he was fat, bald, and very rich. Uncle Clarence dipped his biscuits in his gravy, or in syrup, or more often in a mixture of sorghum and butter that he stirred together on his plate until it looked like baby shit.

  “Is he still planning to be a biologist? He should go to med school and join Walt in his practice.”

  He would point his ray gun at Uncle Clarence and cut a neat plug out of his stomach and carefully ease it out, and Uncle Clarence would ooze from the opening and flow all over them.

  “David.” He started with alarm, then relaxed again. “David, why don’t
you go out and see what the other kids are up to?” His father’s quiet voice, saying actually, that’s enough of that. And they would turn their collective mind to one of the other offspring.

  As David grew older, he learned the complex relationships that he had merely accepted as a child. Uncles, aunts, cousins, second cousins, third cousins. The honorary members: brothers and sisters and parents of those who had married into the family. There were the Sumners and Wistons and O’Gradys and Heinemans and the Meyers and Capeks and Rizzos, all part of the same river that flowed through the fertile Virginia valley.

  He remembered the holidays especially. The old Sumner house was rambling, with many bedrooms upstairs and an attic that was wall-to-wall mattresses, pallets for the children, with an enormous fan in the west window. Someone was forever checking to make certain that they hadn’t all suffocated in the attic. The older children were supposed to keep an eye on the younger ones, but what they did in fact was to frighten them night after night with ghost stories and inhuman sighs and groans. Eventually the noise level would rise until adult intervention was demanded. Uncle Ron would clump up the stairs heavily and there would be a scurrying, with suppressed giggles and muffled screams, until everyone found a bed again, so that by the time he turned on the hall light that illuminated the attic dimly, all the children seemed to be sleeping. He would pause briefly in the doorway, then close the door, turn off the light, and tramp back down the stairs, apparently deaf to the renewed merriment behind him.

  Whenever Aunt Claudia came up, it was like an apparition. One minute pillows would be flying, someone would be crying, someone else trying to read with a flashlight, several of the boys playing cards with another flashlight, some of the girls huddled together whispering what had to be delicious secrets, judging by the way they blushed and looked desperate if an adult came upon them suddenly, and then the door would snap open, the light would fall on the disorder, and she would be standing there. Aunt Claudia was very tall and thin, her nose was too big and she was tanned to a permanent old-leather color. She would stand there, immobile and terrible, and the children would creep back into bed without a sound. She would not move until everyone was back where he or she belonged, then she would close the door soundlessly. The silence would drag on and on. The ones nearest the door would hold their breath, trying to hear breathing on the other side. Eventually someone would become brave enough to open the door a crack, and if she was truly gone, the party would resume.

  The smells of holidays were fixed in David’s memory. All the usual smells: fruitcakes and turkeys, the vinegar that went in the egg dyes, the greenery, and the thick, creamy smoke of bayberry candles. But what he remembered most vividly was the Fourth of July smell of gunpowder that permeated their hair, their clothes, that lasted on their hands for days and days. Their hands would be stained purple-black from berry picking, and the color and smell were one of the indelible images of his childhood. Mixed in with it was the smell of sulfur that was dusted on them liberally to confound the chiggers.

  If it hadn’t been for Celia, his childhood would have been perfect. Celia was his cousin, his mother’s sister’s daughter. She was one year younger than David and by far the prettiest of all his cousins. When they were very young they had promised to marry one day, and when they grew older and it was made abundantly clear that no cousins might ever marry in that family, they had become implacable enemies. He didn’t know how they had been told. He was certain that no one ever put it in words, but they knew. When they could not avoid each other after that, they fought. She pushed him out of the hayloft and broke his arm when he was fifteen, and when he was sixteen they wrestled from the back door of the Wiston farmhouse to the fence fifty or sixty yards away. They tore the clothes off each other and he was bleeding from her fingernails down his back, she from scraping her shoulder on a rock. Then somehow in their rolling and squirming frenzy, his cheek came down on her uncovered chest, and he stopped fighting. He suddenly became a melting, sobbing, incoherent idiot and she hit him on the head with a rock and ended the fight.

  Up to that point the battle had been in almost total silence, broken only by gasps for breath and whispered language that would have shocked their parents. But when she hit him and he went limp, not unconscious, but dazed, uncaring, inert, she screamed, abandoning herself to anguish and terror. The family tumbled from the house as if they had been shaken out, and their first thought must have been that he had raped her. His father hustled him to the barn, presumably for a thrashing. But in the barn, his father, belt in hand, looked at him with an expression that was furious and strangely sympathetic. He didn’t touch David, and only after he had turned and left did David realize that tears were still running down his face.

  In the family there were farmers, a few lawyers, two doctors, insurance brokers and bankers and millers, hardware merchandisers, other shopkeepers. David’s father owned a large department store that catered to the upper-middle-class clientele of the valley. The valley was rich. David always supposed that the family, except for a few ne’er-do-wells, was rather wealthy. Of all his relatives his favorite was his father’s brother Walt. Dr. Walt, they all called him. He played with the children and taught them grown-up things, like where to hit if you really meant it, where not to hit in a friendly scrap. He seemed to know when to stop treating them as children long before anyone else in the family did. Dr. Walt was the reason David had decided very early to become a scientist.

  David was seventeen when he went to Harvard. His birthday was in September and he didn’t go home for it. When he did return at Thanksgiving and the clan had gathered, Grandfather Sumner poured the ritual before-dinner martinis and handed one to him. And Uncle Warner said to him, “What do you think we should do about Bobbie?”

  He had arrived at that mysterious crossing that is never delineated clearly enough to be seen in advance. He sipped his martini, not liking it particularly, and knew that childhood had ended, and he felt a profound sadness and loneliness.

  ~ * ~

  The Christmas that David was twenty-three seemed out of focus. The scenario was the same, the attic full of children, the food smells, the powdering of snow, none of that had changed, but he was seeing it from a new position and it was not the wonderland it had been, and he knew with regret that the enchantment had vanished and could never be recaptured. When his parents went home he stayed on at the Wiston farm for a day or two, waiting for Celia. She had missed the Christmas Day celebration, getting ready for her coming trip to Brazil, but she would be there, her mother had assured Grandmother Wiston, and David was waiting for her, not happily, not with any expectation of reward, but with a fury that grew and caused him to stalk the old house like a boy being punished for another’s sin.

  When she came home and he saw her standing with her mother and her grandmother, his anger melted. It was like seeing Celia in a time distortion, as she was and would be or had been. Her pale hair would not change much, but her bones would become more prominent, and the almost-emptiness of her face would have written on it a message of concern, of love, of giving, of being decisively herself, of a strength unsuspected in her frail body. Grandmother Wiston was a beautiful old lady, he thought in wonder, amazed that he never had seen her beauty before. Celia’s mother was more beautiful than the girl. And he saw the resemblance to his own mother in the trio. Wordlessly, defeated, he turned and went to the rear of the house and put on one of his grandfather’s heavy jackets because he didn’t want to see her at all now, and his own outdoor clothing was in the front hall closet too near where she was still standing.

  He walked a long time in the frosty afternoon, seeing very little, and shaking himself from time to time when he realized that the cold was entering his shoes or making his ears numb. And he found that he was climbing the slope to the antique forest where his grandfather had taken him once, a long time ago. He climbed and became warmer, and at dusk he was under the branches of the tiers of trees that had been there since the beginning of time. T
hey or others that were just like them. Forever wailing for the day when they would reclaim the land and cover the continent once more. Here were the relicts his grandfather had brought him to see. Here was a silverbell grown to the stature of a large tree, while down the slopes, in the lower reaches, it remained always a shrub. Here the white basswood grew alongside the hemlock and the bitternut hickory, and the beeches and sweet buckeyes locked arms.

  “David!” He stopped and listened, certain he had imagined it, but the call came again. “David, are you up here?”

  He turned then and saw Celia among the massive tree trunks. Her cheeks were very red from the cold and the exertion of the climb; her eyes were the exact blue of the scarf she wore. She stopped six feet from him and started to speak again, but didn’t. Instead she drew off a glove and touched the smooth trunk of a beech. “Grandfather Wiston brought me up here, too, when I was twelve. It was very important to him that we understand this place.”