Orbit 9 Read online

  “It’s been a long time,” she finally said.

  “I love you, Jeanie or Joanie as the case may be.”

  “That’s nice.”

  “And you still won’t tell me who you are.”

  “I’d like to, but I won’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t know. I guess it’s just decreed, that’s all.”

  “But that’s silly.”

  “Is it? Tell me, after tonight will you stay here?”

  “I’d like to, but I can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “Well—uh—I’ve got to get back to the road. To my job.”

  “Is that the real reason?”

  “Of course.”

  “No, it isn’t.”

  “How do you know it isn’t?”

  “I just know.”

  “How?”

  “That’s my secret.”

  In the morning they both kissed him good-bye. Each kiss was polite, but with an extra touch—or slight push—of buried affection. He could not tell from the kiss which pair of lips belonged to his yearly bedmate. He tried to pat Timmie’s head, but the kid squirmed away and ran to the sink where he played listlessly with a sponge.

  Jeanie and Joanie had tears in their eyes as he left. He assumed that, if he could weigh their tears, the scale would be evenly balanced. Damn them anyway. Damn both of them, the one he loved and the one who posed as lover.

  * * * *

  —and, you know, years went by—

  * * * *

  The house tilting to the east. Yellow paint peeling, replaced by new yellow coat, which fades to off-white. A new porch with uneven latticework, bits of which break off from time to time as the porch ages and cracks under the strain. Furniture comes and goes, and gradually the newest furniture is indiscernible from the oldest.

  Timmie growing up with little strain, cultivating indifference to everyone: Going off at sixteen to join some mythical military service, polishing off a few Myrmidons and settling down in a southern port with a chubby girl whose face in photographs has little resolution.

  Jeanie and Joanie adding weight and puffiness by degrees. Joanie’s hair becoming gray starkly, Jeanie’s fading to gray subtly. A gradual advance of eyelids downward, so the visible portion of each eye decreases until the two women look out at the world through narrow slits. Which causes them to tilt their heads backward when making an important look-them-in-the-eye statement.

  Leonard losing weight, but becoming emaciated rather than slim. Piling up further nervous tics, an ulcer, and a recurring case of athlete’s foot. Skin hardening, stretched like artist’s canvas from bone to bone. In his face deep lines which gradually link, through tributaries, into an intricate network.

  * * * *

  —and finally, now get this—

  * * * *

  A fluffed-out pillow shelling peas. a bent and dented pipe cleaner watching the painfully slow movements of the pillow’s shelling.

  * * * *

  —uh, he comes up to her and says—

  * * * *

  “Where’s your sister?”

  She took the bowl out of her lap and placed it beside her on the stair. She tilted her head backward. He felt uncomfortable under the stare of eyes he could not see.

  “She died. Months ago. Been a long time since your last visit.”

  It took awhile for him to understand her words.

  “Dead?” he said. “I’m sorry.”

  “Sure.”

  She held position, rigid, a trace of breathing in her amplified bosom.

  * * * *

  —uh, he looks her right in the eye and says—

  * * * *

  “Which one of you is dead?”

  She might have laughed. Or the sudden sound that echoed around him might have been a cackle of disdain. “That’s my secret, old man.”

  He very much wanted to sit down, but she sprawled over most of the steps and the ground was too far away.

  * * * *

  —-uh, then he, then he, uh, goddamn it!—

  * * * *

  “Of course you won’t tell me who you are,” he said.

  “Can’t you tell?”

  He looked for a clue, searched his memory for some feature that had differentiated the two. A difference in the depth of shadow beneath the eyes, a contrast in the shade of gray that had invaded the girls’ hair.

  * * * *

  —uh, this is stupid, I can’t think, damn it—

  * * * *

  “Are you coming to my room tonight?”

  “Yes.”

  He felt relieved. At least she was still alive, it was the other one who’d died. He might not know whether or not she was Jeanie or Joanie, but by this time how important was the name anyhow? He anticipated the night with some pleasure.

  * * * *

  —uh, this is reallystupid but I can’t—

  * * * *

  “Move over.”

  His heart began to beat fast. She hadn’t even waited for night to fall, had entered the room in broad daylight just as he was edging into his nap. In broad daylight without subterfuge. And what the hell kind of subterfuge could she use now anyway? The complete rejection of the Ritual excited him.

  Moving her body as if it were weightless, she made love like a young girl. He responded energetically and the effort almost killed him. But, gasping for breath and hurting in all the usual places, he nevertheless felt abnormally happy.

  “I don’t need to know who you are,” he said.

  “Really? For what reason?”

  The concern in her voice surprised him. Had he, after all these years, finally won the game by giving up? Defeated her because the mystery she’d created so carefully was now irrelevant?

  “I don’t need to know for—well, I guess for sentimental reasons. You’ve given me so much, memories of love and affection, and this night every year that’s given a meaning to my life. I love you for that and for everything.”

  “Well, that’s sentimental all right.”

  * * * *

  —God damn it, I can’t remember the punchline—

  * * * *

  He gazed at her tenderly, pleased that for once he could lie with her and actually see her beside him. She had an odd smile on her face. Then her cheeks began to puff out spasmodically and he realized that she was suppressing a giggle. She lost the battle. The giggle exploded, without transition, into full-scale laughter.

  “What are you laughing at?” he asked. But she couldn’t stop laughing long enough to tell him. It was all so infectious he began to laugh himself.

  * * * *

  —it was something about, no that’s another joke—

  * * * *

  “It’s just that—” she started to say, but instead capitulated to another fit of laughter.

  “This is silly,” he said and buried his face in her ample bosom. The pitch of his laughter deepened to what sounded to him like a resonant bass. At the same time he heard the wheezing part of her laugh reverberating in her chest.

  * * * *

  —sorry, I know you think I’m a real idiot, but—

  * * * *

  “Now—what’s funny?” he said for the umpteenth time, as her laughter ebbed back to giggle proportions.

  “It’s not—it’s not that funny. It’s just that you look so silly and so confident.”

  “Shouldn’t I be?”

  “All that stuff about love—”

  “I’m sorry you think it’s stuff. But really, I don’t care if you don’t return my love.”

  “I never said that.”

  “But I no longer care what you said or never said. None of that is important any more. It’s the total experience that’s important. The years of loving you are more important than knowing whether you’re Joanie or Jeanie. Pardon the stuff, but I love you now and have loved you since the first night years ago when you so attractively materialized inside this room.”

  “Who said it was me that m
aterialized in your room? Who said that I’m the one you’ve been diddling with all the time or half the time or any of the time over the last few decades?”

  * * * *

  —punchline just slipped my mind and it’s a real zinger, too—

  * * * *

  “Are you the one who’s made love to me all these times?”

  “That’s a secret.”

  “Please—I’ve got to know now.”

  “Why now? I thought you didn’t care anymore.”

  “I didn’t, but I do now. I still don’t have to know your name, I just have to know if you’re the one.”

  “I get it. Although knowledge of specific identity is unimportant, what does matter is whether I, whose identity you don’t know, am your lover, whose identity you don’t know, because if I’m not, then the one who died, whose identity you don’t know, is—so that you, whose identity you don’t know, will feel secure in the knowledge that your real and truly genuine affection will be asserted in the right direction, toward the woman in your bed or at the grave of the deceased. Right?”

  “Of course. Isn’t it important?”

  “Is it?”

  “Isn’t it?”

  “It might be, but I am now at this moment in your arms and ready for more, and I want the affection directed at me, whether or not I am the one who deserves it.”

  “Then you’re not. Not the one who deserves it, I mean.”

  “I never said that.”

  “Why can’t you tell me?”

  “I just can’t. Can’t you understand that? I can’t.”

  * * * *

  —but, never mind, a joke’s a joke, and I got another one that’ll just send you into hysterics—

  <>

  * * * *

  Joanna Russ

  GLEEPSITE

  I try to make my sales at night during the night shift in office buildings; it works better that way. Resistance is gone at night. The lobbies are deserted, the air filters on half power; here and there a woman stays up late amid piles of paper; things blow down the halls just out of the range of vision of the watch-ladies who turn their keys in the doors of unused rooms, who insert the keys hanging from chains around their necks in the apertures of empty clocks, or polish with their polishing rags the surfaces of desks, the bare tops of tables. You make some astonishing sales that way.

  I came up my thirty floors and found on the thirty-first Kira and Lira, the only night staff: two fiftyish identical twins in the same gray cardigan sweaters, the same pink dresses, the same blue rinse on their gray sausage-curls. But Kira wore on her blouse (over the name tag) the emblem of the senior secretary, the Tree of Life pin with the cultured pearl, while Lira went without, so I addressed myself to the (minutes-) younger sister.

  “We’re closed,” they said.

  Nevertheless, knowing that they worked at night, knowing that they worked for a travel agency whose hints of imaginary faraway places (Honolulu, Hawaii—they don’t exist) must eventually exacerbate the longings of even the most passive sister, I addressed myself to them again, standing in front of the semicircular partition over which they peered (alarmed but bland), keeping my gaze on the sans-serif script over the desk—or is it roses! —and avoiding very carefully any glance at the polarized vitryl panels beyond which rages hell’s own stew of hot winds and sulfuric acid, it gets worse and worse. I don’t like false marble floors, so I changed it.

  Ladies.

  “We’re closed!” cried Miss Lira.

  Here I usually make some little illusion so they will know who I am; I stopped Miss Kira from pressing the safety button, which always hangs on the wall, and made appear beyond the nearest vitryl panel a bat’s face as big as a man’s: protruding muzzle, pointed fangs, cocked ears, and rats’ shiny eyes, here and gone. I snapped my fingers and the wind tore it off.

  No, no, no, no! cried the sisters.

  May I call you Flora and Dora? I said. Flora and Dora in memory of that glorious time centuries past when ladies like yourselves danced on tables to the applause of admiring gentlemen, when ladies wore, like yourselves, scarlet petticoats, ruby stomachers, chokers and bibs of red velvet, pearls and maroon high-heeled boots, though they did not always keep their petticoats decorously about their ankles.

  What you have just seen, ladies, is a small demonstration of the power of electrical brain stimulation—mine, in this case—and the field which transmitted it to you was generated by the booster I wear about my neck, metallic in this case, though they come in other colors, and tuned to the frequency of the apparatus which I wear in this ring. You will notice that it is inconspicuous and well designed. I am allowed to wear the booster only at work. In the year blank blank, when the great neurosurgical genius, Blank, working with Blank and Blank, discovered in the human forebrain what has been so poetically termed the Circle of Illusion, it occurred to another great innovator, Blank, whom you know, to combine these two great discoveries, resulting in a Device that has proved to be of inestimable benefit to the human race. (We just call it the Device.) Why not, thought Blank, employ the common, everyday power of electricity for the stimulation, the energization, the concretization of the Center of Illusion or (to put it bluntly) anaide-memoire, crutch, companion and record-keeping book for that universal human talent, daydreaming? Do you daydream, ladies? Then you know that daydreaming is harmless. Daydreaming is voluntary. Daydreaming is not night dreaming. Daydreaming is normal. It is not hallucination or delusion or deception but creation. It is an accepted form of mild escape. No more than in a daydream or reverie is it possible to confuse the real and the ideal; try it and see. The Device simply supplements the power of your own human brain. If Miss Kira—

  “No, no!” cried Miss Lira, but Miss Kira had already taken my sample ring, the setting scrambled to erase the last customer’s residual charge.

  You have the choice of ten scenes. No two persons will see the same thing, of course, but the parameters remain fairly constant. Further choices on request. Sound, smell, taste, touch, and kinesthesia optional. We are strictly prohibited from employing illegal settings or the use of variable condensers with fluctuating parameters. Tampering with the machinery is punishable by law.

  “But it’s so hard!” said Miss Kira in surprise. “And it’s not real at all!” That always reassures them. At first

  It takes considerable effort to operate the Circle of Illusion even with mechanical aid. Voltage beyond that required for threshold stimulation is banned by law; even when employed, it does not diminish the necessity for effort, but in fact increases it proportionately. No more than in life, ladies, can you get something for nothing.

  Practice makes perfect.

  Miss Kira, as I knew she would, had chosen a flowery meadow with a suggestion of honeymoon; Miss Lira chose a waterfall in a glade. Neither had put in a Man, although an idealized figure of a Man is standard equipment for our pastoral choices (misty, idealized, in the distance, some even see him with wings) and I don’t imagine either sister would ever get much closer.

  Miss Lira said they actually had a niece who was actually married to a man.

  Miss Kira said a half-niece.

  Miss Lira said they had a cousin who worked in the children’s nursery with real children and they had holidays coming and if I use a variable condenser, what’s it to you?

  Behind me, though I cannot imagine why, is a full-length mirror, and in this piece of inconstancy I see myself as I was when I left home tonight, or perhaps not, I don’t remember: beautiful, chocolate-colored, naked, gold braided into my white hair. Behind me, bats’ wings.

  A mirror, ladies, produces a virtual image, and so does the Device.

  Bats’ faces.

  Hermaphroditic.

  It is no more addicting than thought.

  Little snakes waving up from the counter, a forest of them. Unable to stand the sisters’ eyes swimming behind their glasses, myopic Flora and Dora, I changed the office for them, gave them a rug, hung behind them
on the wall original Rembrandts, made them younger, erased them, let the whole room slide, and provided for Dora a bedroom beyond the travel office, a bordello in white and gold baroque, embroidered canopy, goldfish pool, chihuahuas on the marble and bats in the belfry.