Universe 8 - [Anthology] Read online

  “Well,” Zoe said, “we got three stars at least. And they move.”

  Jerry’s puffball rolled back, his vein-blossomed cheeks shone with wan, reflected light. “Ah, yes. Girder-cars is what we’ve got there, Zoe. Torchlight repairs on the dome. So they send out the magnetized girder-cars at night and let us pretend, with these insulting sops to our memory, that the sky hasn’t been stolen. Pretty, though, I grant you.” He was right. Artificial stars—only three—on a metal zodiac. How did the men inside those topsy-turvy trolleys feel? What was that old song? She mentally hummed a bit of it:

  Would you like to ride on a steer?

  Carry moonbeams home from afar?

  “Damn that old zombie!” Toodles suddenly said to them. “Let’s go on without Paul, he never contributes anyway.”

  “Yeah,” Luther said. “Let’s start.”

  Helen persuaded them to wait a few more minutes. OK with Zoe, A-OK. She listened as Jerry related how he had been involved in a bone-crushing, paralyzing automobile accident in 1989, when most of the old “interstates” were falling into disuse: cracked pavements, weed-grown shoulders, brambly medians. He hadn’t walked since. “When it happened, I’d never even had relations with a woman; impossible, after. At night, sometimes, I’d cry. Just like that fellow in the Hemingway book—except his legs, they weren’t crushed; it was something else. So I never got married until Dr. Tanner accepted me for the study here. Then three wives at once I got. Now, in my old age, poor Yuichan dead, I’m helping my spouses court a fourth one. Who can say it isn’t a strange and wizardly life, our pains and weaknesses notwithstanding?”

  “Not me, Jerry,” Zoe said. “Not me.”

  So Jerry went on and told her about how he had got his degree and then moved into the dome and tried to teach astronomy by means of textbooks, slide programs, and old films. He’d done it for almost twenty years, at which point the city decided it was foolish to pay somebody to lecture about a subject with so limited an application to modern society. “Fffft!” Jerry said. “Fired. Me and others, too. A whole program, kaput!” He had had to live on Teachers’ Retirement and future-secure benefits in a Level 6 cubicle until—

  “Howdy,” Paul said. “Ain’t you started yet?”

  “Sit down,” Luther said. “What have you been up to?”

  Paul, running his fingers through tatters of thin hair, lowered himself creakingly to the fore-edge of a chair between Parthena and Zoe. “Fetched up some night things for our fiancée. She didn’t bring none with her.” He looked at Zoe. And winked. “ ‘Gainst my better judgment, too.”

  “You mighty sweet,” Parthena said. “Now let’s get on with it.”

  They did. The rules were these: 1) Silence while the person whose turn it was thought of a pre-Evacuation experience he wished to evoke for himself or, better, himself and the others. 2) An evocation of that experience in one word, the settled-upon word to be spoken, very clearly, only once. 3) An after-silence in which this word might resonate. 4) No repetitions from previous games. 5) An automatic halt after each Phoenix had had two turns. 6) In order to avoid a debilitating preoccupation with the past, no mention or replaying of any of the game’s reminiscences before or after the sessions themselves.

  Helen, a new Gardner-Crowell braille-writer in her hands, recorded the evening’s twelve reminiscences and called down anyone who repeated any of the old shibboleths. As Zoe discovered, accusations of encroaching senility flew around the circle when this happened. No worries tonight, though. She had never played before, and there’d be no whistle-blowing no matter what words she spoke into the quiet ring of their anticipation.

  “Three months,” Toodles said. “It’s been three months since we’ve done this. Back when Yuichan was ill.”

  “Go ahead, then,” Helen said. “You start, Toodles.”

  The group’s silence grew. The girder-cars above them slid in slow motion down the steeps of the dome. In three or four minutes Toodles dropped a word into the pooling dark, the well of their ancient breaths:

  “Fudgsicles,” she said.

  Paul, Zoe noticed, had his head thrown all the way back over the top of his chair, his eyes all goggly and shiny. The old man’s mouth was open, too. If he hadn’t already moved his butt back into the chair, he would have fallen to the roof tiles.

  It was Parthena’s turn. Three or four minutes after Toodles’ reminiscence, the tall black woman said,

  “Scup’nins.” Scuppernongs, that meant. A kind of grape.

  When the word had echoed in their heads for a while, Luther said, “Paul isn’t going to say nothin’, Zoe. You go ahead now. It’s your turn.” No, he wasn’t going to say anything, Paul: he was still mouthing Parthena’s word.

  As for Zoe, she was ready. She had thought of it while Jerry was explaining the rules to her. But it wouldn’t do to blurt it out, it wouldn’t do to show she’d been thinking ahead of the game. (Surely, they all did it, though.) So she waited. Then, leaning forward to look into the pedestrian park below, she gave the word to her new family:

  “Fireflies...”

  * * * *

  6 mount fujiyama and the orpianoogla.

  In their suite on the fourth floor the Phoenix slept in a circular common room, their beds positioned around a hub where the self-locomoting biomonitor cabinet (the first of three on the floor) had already taken up its brooding watch. Each bed had a nightstand, an effects-bureau, and an easy chair in its vicinity, as well as plasti-cloth dividers that, at a finger’s touch, would roll automatically into place. Since no one seemed to use these, Zoe, grateful to Paul for having fetched her a nightgown, got ready for bed in front of the others.

  Like having six Rabons in the room with you. Well, five: Jerry had powered himself off somewhere. “Like some time to himself ‘fo’ turnin’ in,” Parthena said. But even five Rabons was plenty, even if they were decent enough not to devour you with their eyes. (Rabon never had been.) Old Paul, of the five, excepted. Again.

  Anyhow, it didn’t take this creaky crew long to start plying the waters of Nod. No, sir. Everyone off, it seemed, but Zoe herself. She even heard Jerry come whirring back into the snore-ridden room and hoist himself out of the wheel chair onto his bed, In five or ten minutes he, too, was rowing himself under. Only Zoe had her head clear, her whole, fatigued body treading against the desire to be drowned in sleep. My sweet lord, what a day! Every bit of it passed in front of her eyes.

  Then Zoe heard the sobs. For a long time she listened to them. It was Toodles, two beds away, heart-troubled Toodles.

  Feeling for slippers that weren’t there, Zoe got out of bed. She walked barefooted to the easy chair beside Toodles, sat down, and smoothed back the woman’s moist, frizzly bangs. “Can you tell me what it is?”

  Unnhuh; nope. Strangled, desperate noises.

  “Is it about that supper-time business, Toodles? Hope not. Up against you I look like the . . . the Wicked Witch of the North.” Which was a Glinda-the-Good lie if she’d ever told one; white lie, though.

  Subsiding strangles—”It . . . isn’t . . . that”—trailing off into hiccups. “Really . . . it . . . isn’t . . . that” Apparently to prove this contention, Toodles pulled herself up to a sitting posture Across her rumpled lap she reeled in, inch by hand-wrung inch, a dressing gown that had been spread out over her bedclothes. A corner of it went to her throat, and was held there.

  “What, then? Can you say?”

  A modicum of control now. “Yuichan,” Toodles said. “I was thinking of Yuichan. You see this robe, Zoe. . . . He gave me this robe.” It was too dark to see well, but Toodles turned the robe toward her and displayed it anyway, an occasional hiccup unsteadying her hands. All Zoe got was a musty whiff of a familiar, kidneylike odor.

  “Here,” Zoe said, and punched on the reading light on Toodle’s headboard. A circle of paleness undulated on the dressing gown. Execrable taste, Helen had said. And rightly: On one side of the robe, an embroidered, snow-covered peak; on the other (once Toodles ha
d lifted the limp lapel so that she could see them), the words Mount Fujiyama. An ugly and smelly garment, no matter how you hemmed or whiffed it.

  “Oh, I know it’s not to everybody’s taste,” Toodles said. “But it reminds me of Yuichan. He mail-ordered it from San Francisco four years ago when he learned that there was a very sick Japanese woman in the nursing section of the hostel. That was just like Yuichan. He gave the robe to that poor woman. A coupla years later, when the woman died and her son threw away almost all of her effects, Yuichan brought the gown back and gave it to me. Oh, it was tight on me and it smelled like urine, all right, but I knew what spirit Yuichan gave it in and I had it washed and washed—till I was afraid it’d fall apart in the water.” Toodles spread the dressing gown over her knees. “And tonight . . . tonight ... it reminds me of him ... of Yuichan . . . just ever so much.” And propped her elbows on her shrouded knees and lowered her face into her hands.

  The consolation Zoe gave Toodles was that of sitting beside her until the poor, blowsy woman, mascara long since washed away, fell into a sleep as mortally shallow as the crater holes of her eyes.

  * * * *

  But the next afternoon, in the room they called the recreation center, Toodles sat at the battery-powered orpianoogla and led them all in a songfest: thin, strained vocal cords reaching for notes those cords couldn’t remember. In fact, only Toodles had an unimpaired range, a bravura contralto that could soar like an under-course glissador or tiptoe stealthily through a pianissimo lullaby. With one arm she led their singing, with her free hand she rippled the keys, punched buttons, flipped toggles, and mixed in the percussion. Nor did her heavy legs keep her from foot-pedaling like an unbeliever on burning coals. The whole suite of rooms reverberated with Toodles’ music, and Zoe, clapping and croaking with the rest, wondered dimly if she had dreamed, only dreamed, the midnight despair of this boisterous Phoenix.

  “Very good!” Toodles would shout at them between choruses. “Ain’t you glad we’re too old for them jackasses who passed the Retrenchment Edicts to come in here and shut us up?!”

  Zoe was. Outlawed music they were souling on, outlawed lyrics and proscribed morals-corrupting rhythms. Old times. As they clapped and sang, Helen told Zoe that Toodles had once been a renaissance-swing headliner in a New Orleans hookah club. “Turn of the century and a few years after,” Helen stage-whispered in her ear as they all clapped to the rumbling orpianoogla. “When she was forty she was doing a bushman, pop-op-rah review in D.C. Forty! Quite professional, the old newsfax say.” Since ‘35, when the ward reps and urban councilmen panicked, those kinds of performances had been totally nyet-ted, at least in Atlanta. Who knew, these days, what other cities did?

  “All right!” Toodles shouted. “This one’s ‘Ef Ya Gotta Zotta!’ Way back to twenny-awht—tooo, evwerbodddy!”

  So they all sang, the orpianoogla singlehandedly—literally singlehandedly—sounding like the entire defunct, blown-away, vinyl-scrutchy Benny Goodman Orchestra of a century ago. Or Glenn Miller’s, maybe. This was the chorus:

  Ef ya gotta zotta

  Thenna zotta wa me:

  Durnchur lay ya hodwah

  On tha furji Marie.

  Ef ya gotta zotta,

  Then ya gotta zotta wa me!

  My sweet lord! Zoe remembered the whole song, every kapomi word of all seven verses. She and Rabon had danced to that one; they’d done the buck-and-wing jitters in the remodeled Regency lobby ballroom. My sweet lord, she thought: “Ef Ya Gotta Zotta!”

  But after the last sing-through of the chorus, Toodles barreled out of the renaissance-swing retrospective and into a hard, hard computer-augmented tour of late-twenties/early-thirties racked-and-riled terrorism. With the advent of this deliberate cacophony, old Paul stopped stomping and let his mouth fall open, just as it had during the rotational reminiscence. The others, like Zoe, irresistibly fell to swaying in their chairs.

  Toodles sang the ominous lyrics, and sang them so certainly that you could look at her full, jowly face and see that despite the sags, and wens, and ludicrous, smeared lips, she was living every note, vivisecting every lurid word and dragging its guts out for the purpose of feeding her own and her listeners’ irrational fears. (Which was fun: a musical horror movie.) Toodles sang, and sang, and sang. She sang “Walnut Shell Nightmare,” “Tomb of the Pharaohs,” “Crimson Clay Tidal Wave,” and “Outside Sky.” When the last note of the orpianoogla died away, a rain of bravos fell down on the (incredibly) beginning-to-blush Miz Joyce “Toodles” Malins-Phoenix. Even Paul joined in, though he stomped like a jackass rather than hallooed.

  “Her first concert since Yuichan died,” Helen whispered.

  “Encore!” Jerry shouted. “That we wish more of!”

  “Hooooi!” Luther said. “I ain’t heard her sing or play so well since Year-end Week in ‘38.”

  “I’m in as fine a voice as I was thirty years ago,” Toodles said, turning on her stool. “It’s hard to believe and it sounds like bragging, but by God! it’s the gospel truth.”

  “Damn straight,” Luther said.

  “You ain’ done, though,” Parthena said. “Finish out now like we awways do, ‘fo’ we have to go eat.”

  Toodles, turning back to the keyboard, honored this request. Ignoring the buttons, switches, and resonator pins on the console, she played with both hands: an old melody, two hundred years almost. Everyone sang, everyone harmonized. Zoe found that, just as with “Ef Ya Gotta Zotta,” she remembered the words—every word, each one called to her lips from a time-before-time that had nothing to do with the Urban Nucleus, or with Sanders and Lannie, or with Mr. Leland and the Geriatrics Hostel. And it wasn’t timesickness or nostalgia that fed her recollection of the lyrics (some things you don’t ever want to go back to), but instead a celebration of the solidity of the present: this present: the moment itself. They all sang:

  ‘Way down upon the Swanee River

  Far, far away,

  There’s where my heart is turning ever,

  There’s where the old folks stay.

  They even sang the stanza about the old plantations and the plaintive line “Oh, darkies, how my heart grows weary,” Luther and Parthena too, and none of what they sang distressed them. Stephen Foster somehow was and wasn’t Stephen Foster when interpreted by an orpianoogla. Sticks and stones, Zoe thought, and names can never...

  Why, only a week ago her own daughter had called her, during a moment of ill-concealed morning sickness, a mummified witch. Zoe had chuckled: Clucka-clucka-cluck. What else could she do? When you’re two steps from the finish line, you laugh at the self-loathing insults of also-rans. You have to. Even in the melancholy performance of a nigh-on dead-and-gone work of a sure-enough dead-and-gone composer, Toodles’ whole body laughed. Toodles was two steps from the finish line. They all were. And it certainly wasn’t death they were running at, not as Zoe saw it. No, sir. Something else altogether; something else.

  * * * *

  7 parthena

  That evening, after the orpianoogla-assisted songfest, Parthena, Helen, and Jerry saw to the cooking of supper. And after supper Zoe helped these three clean up in the galley beside the dining room (whereas, downstairs, three levels under, Lannie and Sanders had only a kitchen board in their cubicle and no dining room at all). A beautiful day it had been, a zippity-doo-dah day if she’d ever lived one. Not since Rabon...

  “You quilt?” Parthena asked her as they put the last of the china away. But Zoe’s attention was momentarily elsewhere. Jerry, in his wheel chair, was handing the plates to Helen, and the blind woman was stacking them cleanly in the hanging plastic cabinet over the sink. Before beginning, Helen had produced a pair of miniature black goggles, or binoculars, from a dress pocket and snapped these on over her eyes with seemingly only a thin metal bridge-piece to support them. With these in place she moved as if sighted. And yet this was the first time she had worn the goggles in Zoe’s presence.

  “Hey, Zoe,” Parthena said again. “You quilt?” />
  “You mean stitch squares together? Sew? Maybe. Things with my hands I could always bluff through. I’m a bluffer.”

  “Shoot, we ain’ even axed you yet what you good at. Where you work ‘fo’ you got put on the Ole Folk Dole Role?”

  “Photography,” Zoe said. “I took pitchurs. Still ones and moving ones. And I was good, too, you know. If you want to know the truth, some of my still pitchurs are pretty moving.”

  They all laughed. Zoe told them how she and Rabon had been a team for both the Journal/Constitution combine and one of the visual-media affiliates; neither wrote copy (“I didn’t have the schooling and Rabon hadn’t put his to use that way”), but they could both wield cameras, video portables, and the instant-print-making varieties. She had been better than Rabon was, but from ‘01 to ‘09 she had been taken out of action four times by the onset of motherhood and he had got more commissions by virtue of his being insusceptible, as he put it, to pregnancy. But it had all been planned, and after Melanie was born the UrNu Sitter Mission Program had freed them both to pursue their careers. Sort of. They got docked an incredible number of earnies to have Lannie mission-sat for four hours a day, four days a week, she and Rabon splitting up the remaining hours and working less frequently as a team. But they’d done it, she and Rabon, and maybe it was only Lannie’s having been their only child that had caused her to grow up a gimme girl and a sometimes-sweet, more-usually-petulant young woman. What lovely portraits Zoe had made of her when she was little, ole sweet-treat Lannie. In a telecom to her that morning Zoe had asked her daughter to bring from her sleeper-cove only the few clothes she had there and the photographs on the walls, and Melanie had said she would bring them: maybe Mr. Leland had them already.