Universe 9 - [Anthology] Read online

  “But Spider, you have to understand, here I feel like I can finally relax. I have a home for the first time in years. I would love for you to join us, I know you’re not happy with Coyote and the rest, but please don’t ask me to trade my family for you. Because I would have to say no.” Her finger tips moved up Spider’s face, the lines of her mouth, her eyes, the ridges of her brows. “Don’t be sad,” said Walker. “Lover, people are never happy as commodities.”

  Spider ripped a tuft of grass, threw it on the breeze. She felt that terrible weariness wash over her again. “But it’s not as if I wanted you all for myself,” she said, hearing her voice quaver. “I want a big household, I do. I’d just like it to be all women....”

  Walker’s finger tip on her cheek abruptly left a wet track. “Oh, Spider, Spider. . . . Look, what if my baby is a boy? Would you refuse to live with him? Spider— lover—my commitment is stronger than that. I’m settled here. That’s why I decided, to have this child. I have a home. I need that.”

  Spider moved away slightly. “So it’s settled.”

  “Settled! Spider, I’m settled.”

  She felt the muscles of her chin tug down, those above her eyes pull back. She wiped one cheek with the back of her hand, swallowed. “God damn it.” Her fingers clutched cool grass. “If only I’d found you a couple years ago. If only you weren’t into this pregnancy mode ...”

  Walker’s eyebrows arched. She shook her head slowly. “Spider, just listen to yourself! Do you realize how you’d react if any man made a crack like that? Now, come on. Be my sister today. I want you to be with me.”

  Spider sobbed so hard it hurt her throat, pulled Walker to her chest and held her tight.

  * * * *

  “Hey!” cried Coyote. “I’m for a shower! Who’s with?”

  “Me,” said Fuchsia, flecked with clay.

  “Sure,” said Swann, coming in dusty.

  Sparrow grabbed Coyote’s hand and led the way.

  Water fell, like heavy light, in cold, thick blue drops. Coyote and Sparrow and Fuchsia and Swann jumped and danced in the indoor rain, rubbing each other with sponges and flinging wet hair.

  “Who will scrub my back?” asked Fuchsia.

  “I will,” said Swann and Coyote at the same time. They laughed and set to work on either side.

  “Ahhh,” said Fuchsia, “you two do a heavy job.”

  Sparrow caught their attention with a flutter of hands. Fuchsia’s peeing in the shower!

  “Huh?” said Fuchsia. He blinked and looked down.

  Coyote laughed and tapped Sparrow’s shoulder. “Look again,” he said. “That’s just water running down.”

  Sparrow looked confused.

  “Just look at me. Just look at yourself!”

  Sparrow peered down across his rounded belly, then giggled delightedly. The water ran down his sleek brown skin, coursed around his navel, and dribbled off his penis, arcing through the air to the slatted floor.

  Swann bent down to rub shampoo into Sparrow’s frizzy hair. “Occupational hazard,” she said. Like her face, her body ran with wrinkles. Her breasts hung low and bobbled in the wet light.

  I didn’t see that word, signed Sparrow.

  “Occupational hazard,” enunciated Swann. “It’s an old expression that means, well, that there are certain things that happen to you as a result of what you do for a living.”

  What kinds of things?

  Swann cleared her throat and frowned. Fuchsia knelt beside her and poked Sparrow in the belly, eliciting a giggle. “For example,” he said, “you were born with knees, so whenever you fall down on something rough and hard, you skin them. That’s the occupational hazard of having knees.”

  Swann was shaking her head. “That’s the occupational hazard of running around!”

  Coyote squatted, too. “And we,” he said, “have penises because we were born male, so it looks like we’re peeing in the shower. Even when we’re not!”

  Sparrow laughed, then looked at Coyote’s groin, at Fuchsia’s, at Swann’s, then at his own small stub.

  “All done?” said Swann, rinsing under the shower.

  Fuchsia stepped to the wall and turned off the water with a wish.

  “I’ll get the towels,” said Coyote, but Swann caught his arm.

  “Not for me,” she said. “It’s quite warm enough outside for me to dry off.”

  “Same here,” said Fuchsia.

  Me, too, signed Sparrow.

  Coyote shrugged. “Me, too.” As a group they strolled outside, picked clothes off the line, at length chose bicycles from the rack in the shed, and pushed off down the trail.

  * * * *

  Sparrow parked his bike with the others and wandered off alone to explore the farm. He had been here only once or twice before, never with so many people around. The largest building of the homestead was a huge pyramid made of wood. Its windows, and sections of its walls, were thrown open like so many tongues to lap up the day. Sparrow avoided the crowd of kids on the lawn and circled the house, peering into open rooms. In one, about ten people sat in a circle holding hands. They all had their eyes closed, and he guessed they must have been omming. Fuchsia had taught him to do that last fall. It made him feel good, especially when he felt it through his hands from the people next to him.

  He slipped through a low arch in the hedge and came out in the garden. Flowers of all colors spread beneath the bright sun. Beyond some bushes, a thick cherry tree gnarled its way into the sky where it burst with a cloud of white blossoms. Several pairs of legs dangled down, and higher up a section shook, releasing a minor snowstorm to the breeze. Sparrow padded carefully through the bushes past the tree, grinning gleefully at the thrill of secrecy that shivered up his spine.

  He ran around a corner of hedge and found himself abruptly in the middle of a group of people lounging on the grass. Several looked up at him. He couldn’t move. One woman flailed at a guitar and everyone swayed, openmouthed. He couldn’t make out the words: their lips didn’t move enough. With an effort he jerked away and ran in another direction.

  Some secrecy! He found a large bush and crawled inside, crouched in the flat, dry space surrounded by leaves. This was more like it.

  He really wondered, sometimes, what it must be like to know about things you couldn’t see. He could feel some things, like drums, and omming, and the zeppelin that morning. He felt those things in his stomach and with his finger tips, and when he laid his hand across the throat of someone who talked or sang. But what was it like to feel someone whose back was turned talking across the room? What was it like to feel a bird’s throat ripple in the trees? To feel the wind shiver through the branches of a tree? Could other people really feel these things from far away?

  His attention was caught by movement through the leaves. He leaned forward and peered out. Everyone was walking in one direction—toward the house. It must be time! But how did they know?

  * * * *

  The kitchen was crowded and noisy when the bell began to ring, high in the apex of the house. For the space of one breath, everyone around Coyote fell silent, then began to talk again, but softly now, with a different tone. They started to move toward the door that led to the commons. Coyote set his cup of tea on the table and followed, feeling socially detached and at the same time somehow clear, inside, riveted to the moment. He smiled and nodded when his eyes met those of friends, but he didn’t feel like talking to anybody, and no one tried to talk to him. The grandfather clock in the hall read three-fifteen, its long pendulum tocking slowly back and forth behind the window in its case.

  The commons was a two-story-high pointed space. Walker sat in lotus in the middle of the floor as her friends filled up the room around her, children toward the center and the tallest adults lining the three walls. Coyote sat near the middle with people his own height. It looked to him like nearly a hundred people. Some of them he recognized as members of this household. He caught sight of Swann and Fuchsia sitting together over to his right, thei
r backs against the wall, but neither of them glanced his way. In fact, nearly everyone was facing Walker now. Coyote turned back, shifted his legs into a comfortable half-lotus, and noticed Sparrow’s skinny silhouette in a doorway across the room. He wished the boy would look his way....

  The group began to breathe with Walker. Her diaphragm pulled in, relaxed, her nostrils flared visibly with each inhale. The only sounds were the unison breathing and a handful of children and dogs yelping outside. Walker’s vast belly shuddered. A low, whispered chant began to grow among the members of the gathering, in time with her breathing, in time with the contractions of her uterus. Coyote cleared his throat and added his own murmur to the group. They were like an ocean to Walker’s moon, he thought, and tucked the conceit away in a safe place where he might find it the next time he worked on his poetry.

  Like an incoming tide, the chanting rose and fell in successively stronger waves. One of the three midwives held a wristwatch in his hand and murmured occasional cues to Walker, though all of her attention seemed to be focused inward. Her eyelids were closed, her mouth half open. Several times she changed position, working into progressively higher stances till she squatted, her buttocks clear of the floor. The hands of another midwife (Coyote recognized her from the community garden—her name was Gael) rested on Walker’s shoulders for balance, while a third lay on the sheet to massage Walker’s belly, her groin, her enlarging vagina. The chanting reached its final peak as Walker made the sharp, high noises of ecstasy and pain, and with surprising suddenness the red, wet bulge of the baby’s head appeared between Walker’s thighs. Walker leaned back into Gael’s arms, while the third midwife cradled the emerging baby in her hands. The hips, the knees, the tiny feet came out, and the woman brought the infant up and laid it on Walker’s stomach. Walker’s hand groped and found the little hands and head and briefly she smiled. Coyote thought she looked exhausted. Gael had slipped a pillow under her head. The room was quiet, remained so until after some minutes the baby began to use its lungs—a small cry escaped to mark that moment—and people began to murmur, began to talk, began to cry and laugh.

  Coyote didn’t stay to see the cutting of the cord or the afterbirth rite. He rose stiffly to his feet and joined several others outside. No one said very much, just smiled, or looked serene. Someone over by the garden was getting sick, helped by friends. One man Coyote didn’t know laughed loud with wet cheeks and spread his arms to the sun.

  Coyote began to look around for Sparrow.

  “But just look at the eyes! Hey, there, little one!” Spider stroked one tiny palm with her finger tip, and the hand closed around her knuckle, the little eyes tracked, and tracked again. Spider grinned down at Walker. “See that?” She took Walker’s right hand and folded it gently around the baby’s hand holding her finger. “See? I mean, feel? That’s an instinctive mechanism left over from when we all had hair on our bellies and backs that babies clung to.”

  Walker’s marbled eyes were wet, seemed to look somewhere near the ceiling. “I do see,” she said.

  Spider grinned and kissed the woman’s fingers. “You did all right for yourself, lady, you did okay! She’s even a she.”

  Walker smiled wearily and shook her head. “You know, my love, I have long maintained that birthing is not so much a woman thing to do as a human thing. It’s only to be regretted that nearly half our population are incapable of experiencing this god-awful exhaustion.”

  Spider laughed. “Hush, we’ll talk politics later.” And felt suddenly sad. The commons was nearly empty now, the sun was falling in the sky. Or rather, Spider thought, the earth is rolling up. And felt a trickle course down her cheek. “Walker?” She fumbled in her pocket till she found the scrap of paper.

  “Mmm?” Walker looked almost asleep.

  “I’ll see you later, huh?”

  She nodded dreamily.

  “Say... in about a year?”

  Walker opened her sightless eyes.

  “I’m going,” Spider said with an effort. “I don’t know, East, I think. I want to see Virginia. I want to get some dust between my toes, try some other styles.” She waited for Walker to say something, but no reply came. “I’ll come back next spring, I promise. Just think! This little lady will be running the place by then.”

  Walker laughed then, with tears. “I really doubt that!”

  “I love you,” said Spider.

  “I love you, too.”

  Spider bent down to kiss her cheek, her lips. She nuzzled the infant, rose, and quickly walked away.

  * * * *

  Bike? No, walk. Leave the asphalt path and take the deer trail through the woods. Fir trees, bushes, brambles, and that thick, sweet smell of afternoon. Sparrow ran along the path until his breath got hard. He rested, pulled down his pants and stooped, watched a pale green frond that was just beginning to lift from the crumbs of earth at the base of a tall, thick tree. Baby plant, baby girl. Dying, being old. Being himself. Was Swann ever a baby? Sparrow shook his head in slow thought.

  He wondered if everyone looked like that at birth. So quiet, so messy, glistening, dripping, caked with cheesy stuff, so red and blue and small! Sparrow was nearly six, a lot older than Walker’s baby, but he was still a baby compared to Spider and Coyote and Fuchsia and Rose— and they were all babies compared to Swann. And Swann was a baby compared to . . . well, to Douglas. Just where did that end?

  He shivered and found himself in shadow. He got to his feet jerkily, tugged up his pants, and trudged on down the path. The low red sun flickered among the tree trunks as he passed along. The trail meandered around and down and then rose steeply, rounded a ridge, and deposited him on the edge of the woods, just meters from the main dome door.

  He stopped, feeling numb and old. His left cheek began to hurt, and tears ran. Sparrow ran.

  * * * *

  The screen door slammed against the late afternoon, and footsteps pattered down the ramp. Coyote glanced up from his sewing. “Hey—” His gray eyes tracked across the room, followed Sparrow’s flight through the blue flannel door. “Huh,” he said. “I wonder what his hurry was.”

  Swann, beside him, ejected a wooden egg from a sock and cast her eyebrows toward her son. “Didn’t you see the tears?”

  “What?” Coyote lifted his thin shoulders against his cloud of rusty hair. “But—”

  “I was watching Sparrow through the whole thing,” came Fuchsia’s voice from behind a pair of trousers. Flip, flop, folded, they landed with a whump on a pile of clothes. “I think Sparrow took it . . . specially. . . .” he said. “I think that in some special, five-year-old way, he really understood.”

  For a minute the room was silent but for sounds of cloth against cloth. Then Coyote said, “Oh, God...”

  “I think Sparrow was touched,” said Swann, “in a religious sense.”

  Coyote regarded her silently for a moment, then speared the patch he was sewing with his needle and stood up from the rug.

  “Now, Coyote—” Swann began, but he was gone. She settled back, shaking her head and thrusting out her lower lip. “My lord, when will that man learn to leave well enough alone.”

  Spider pushed aside her door (a snapshot of a spiral molecule, silk-screened on burlap) and walked into the room. “Swann,” she said, “I’ve got something to—”

  “He just doesn’t listen,” said Swann. “And Sparrow can’t.”

  “Swann—”

  “Oh well, I suppose we’ll have to just leave them to find their own answers together.” She shook her head again.

  Spider sighed. “I guess you’re right.”

  Fuchsia nudged Swann, cleared his throat. “Spider?” he said. “Were you about to—”

  Spider smiled wanly at her brother and shook her head. She turned and went back into her room to finish packing.

  Coyote found Sparrow huddled inside a tangle of blanket against the domelet wall. “Hey,” he said, gently shaking Sparrow’s shoulder. “It’s me.” He eased the boy over onto his back
and regarded the red, wet eyes. “Hey, what did you think of the birth today? I thought it was beautiful, didn’t you?”

  Sparrow nodded, shaking brown frizz.

  “Well, what did you think? What did you feel? I really want to know.”

  Sparrow frowned, nearly smiled, then started to sob. Coyote found a hand and squeezed.

  “Wasn’t she pretty?” he said. “I’ve seen three births in my life—one of them was you—and each time it was just too good to believe, just too beautiful to compare.”

  His son turned away, crying freely into the blanket.

  “Hey,” said Coyote, “hey,” and ran his hand along the small, skinny arm that showed. Sparrow released a long, low wail that made Coyote shiver. With care he turned the boy over again. Sparrow looked at him with bright, wet eyes, and worked his other hand free from the blanket. His fingers shook, but Coyote could still read what they said.