Year's Best SF 10, page 44
The man who answers is not quite twice our age, perhaps a little younger. His beard looks new, as though his chin has gone untended for about as long as the garden outside. He wears a comfortable, tailored suit.
Inside, Jamin finally uncovers his face and embraces the older man, saying, “Hello, Hodge. This is the friend I was telling you about—”
Somehow I cheerfully complete the introductions. Jamin and I sit at a counter in the kitchen while Hodge finishes cooking our dinner. The room smells of garlic and oil. Jamin and Hodge discuss work—they are both employed in law—and I avoid nearly all the personal questions directed at me. The songs of Noh Sis stream from the speakers to fill most of the awkward silences.
We are seated around Hodge’s elegant antique table, having finished a delightful cold corn chowder and a hot pepper salad. A platter of spinach-feta pastries rests between us. As I am helping myself to a second serving, and laughing heartily at an anecdote that Hodge is telling about the prosecution of a man whose pet dog kept straying into the women’s quarter, Jamin rises and wipes his mouth with his napkin.
“Please forgive me,” he says. “I didn’t realize how late it has gotten and I promised to meet Zel this evening.”
“But we’ve scarcely begun,” Hodge says, evincing real dismay.
And all I can do is think: Jamin, you animal!
But Jamin insists, and I stand to go with him, but both men persuade me to stay by making promises of transportation. Then Hodge bustles around putting together a plate of food for Jamin to take with him, growing particularly distressed because his cake hasn’t cooled sufficiently and falls apart when he cuts a slice to go. The whole time Jamin smiles at me but refuses to meet my eyes. Finally he’s gone, and Hodge and I return to our meal. Sometime during this the music has fallen silent and Hodge is too distracted to reset it.
“How long have you known Jamin?” he says after a sip of wine.
“All my life,” I say. “We grew up in the same Children’s Center, and then attended the same schools.”
“He’s well-meaning, but what a beastly thing to do.”
I’m not sure what to say so I stare at my plate and concentrate on eating, making extravagant praise of the food between the clinks of silverware on porcelain.
“So,” Hodge says after another drink of wine. “You’re the marrying kind?”
“Yes.” My heart trips and stumbles. “Yes, I am.”
“It won’t be bad. Will this coming ceremony be your first time?”
“Yes. I mean, I haven’t decided yet.”
“You’ll be nervous your first time. It won’t be bad.”
I choke out laughter. “Aren’t you supposed to tell me how good it will be? How proud I’ll feel?”
He winces. Folding his napkin, he leans his elbows on the table and looks directly at me. “Look, Jamin thinks that we’re both the same type, but you—”
My heart catches in my throat. Everyone knows I am different. Even a stranger who just met me can tell.
“—should know that I just lost my partner.”
“Oh,” I say. “I’m sorry.”
He holds up his hand. “No, it’s all right. We’d been together for almost fifteen years, but he’d been unhappy for a very long time. I’m glad he ran off.”
“Where’d he go to?” I ask, desperate to change the subject.
Hodge shakes his head. “Look, that’s not important. I’m happy by myself right now. I hope you understand.”
He doesn’t sound happy at all. “Of course! I mean I—”
“I’m not like you,” he says in a low whisper, and then drinks the rest of his wine. “Oh! The story about the man with the dog, did I ever finish that?”
“No.” I had forgotten it already.
“The last time they caught him, they stoned him to death and set his body on fire. That kind of perversion can’t be tolerated, you know. We aren’t animals, with animal passions.”
“I know that.” My voice is strained because I am scared.
“Well, then. Good.” He rises abruptly. “I’ll call you a taxi.” He fumbles at the counter, frowning. “The cake looks like a disappointment, but I’m sure it still tastes fine. I’ll send some with you.”
When the taxi arrives and I step off the stoop into darkness, plastic-wrapped plate in hand, I hear him say, “Good luck with the marrying. It’s over quickly.”
He reminds me of a piece of topiary, a plant forced by wires and pruning into a facsimile of something else, so twisted over time that he no longer resembles himself. I can feel myself being twisted, misshapen more each day. But I’ll resist it.
The taxi door slams and whisks me away.
I don’t see Ali at work the next day or the morning following that. At lunch, I am standing by the inner windows overlooking the courtyard below while the children weave an endless pattern of joy amid the trees. The lobby is busy, many people rushing by. Pressed to the window, I am more aware of the antiseptic smell of the cleaning liquids than I am of the person standing next to me. So several minutes pass before I look up and realize it’s Ali.
She taps her foot on the tiles. “Rubber floor. Very smart. They aren’t able to zap you here.”
“I’m sorry,” I blurt out, sorry that I haven’t noticed her, sorry that I hadn’t talked to her earlier.
Ali lowers her long eyelashes and looks away, her weight shifting to leave. “Well, if you want to be zapped, you could always go back to your desk.”
“Wait!”
She pauses in midstep. “I’m waiting.”
And because I don’t know what else to say, because there is only one thing besides her on my mind, I ask, “Will you be marrying this weekend?”
“That’s a very personal thing to ask,” she says and walks quickly away to the other side of the lobby where she stands by a decorative sarcophagus filled with polished stones and bubbling water, watching the children below.
I want to run after her, take her by the elbow and make her understand. I want her to feel for me the way I feel toward her. I want her to peel off her gloves and sink her bare hands into my flesh, stripping it away to the bone, until she reaches my heart and can soothe away the ache I feel for her.
Instead, I also turn and look out the window again. From this height, I can’t tell if the children below are boys or girls.
Heart Nouveau is even more crowded than normal tonight because of the Bachelors Party. Jamin and Zel have brought me here to celebrate, just as all the other normal men have brought their friends who will be marrying tomorrow. We bachelors are few, no more than one in ten, so the annual bacchanal becomes a general cause for celebration.
Smoke swirls across the bar and dance floor, eddying with the currents of moving people and the crashing waves of music. Zel has taken off his shirt and is dancing half-naked under the strobe lights with the others in an orgy of arms and hands. I’m standing off to one side of the dance floor beside Jamin, who doesn’t dance but gazes on Zel adoringly.
“He’s the image of a god, isn’t he?” Jamin says.
It’s an echo from our scriptures. “And in his own image God made them, man and woman; and bade them be fruitful and multiply; and set them apart from the beasts and gave them dominion over the beasts.”
“He’s perfect for you,” I answer, and Jamin smiles.
And I think of other words from our scriptures—“It is good for a man never to touch a woman, nor a woman touch a man, lest they be tempted to behave as the beasts of the field do in their passions”—and consider that I have never seen beasts in the field. These days, even the zygotes of beasts are scanned for their genetic health before they are brought to fruition in the womb-banks; the only place I have seen animals is in cages or under the straps that hold them down beneath our syringes. My theogenetics classes glossed over the details of this dire sin lest we be tempted to copy it, only teaching us that before God gave people the wisdom of science we behaved as beasts.
Zel grabs me by the hand, pulling me onto the dance floor where the lights are flashing, music pumping, and ecstatic faces surround me. He only wants me to be happy and he only knows what makes him happy, and so he tries to bring me to that too. I resist him—I resist everything these days—and pull away.
“Smile,” he shouts at me above the din. “Have some fun!”
“I’m having fun!” I shout in reply.
“Are you excited by marrying tomorrow?” I mumble my answer to him, but he doesn’t hear me and leans forward, sweat dripping from his forehead onto my shoulder, shouting “What?”
“I said, ‘Scripture says it’s better to marry than to burn!’”
He laughs as if this is the wittiest thing in the world, and spins around, arms and fists pumping in beat with the music.
But I am burning already. The thought of Ali is a fire in my mind and a searing pain in my flesh, an unquenchable flame, even though I know all my feelings for her are wrong.
Still, I will go do my duty tomorrow, and marry rather than burn.
The next morning, I arise before dawn with the other bachelors. Many have hangovers, and some are too sick to marry this time. Their absences are noted by the priest’s assistant in his white jacket as we board the bus. Those who have not made it are roundly mocked by even the sickest of those aboard. The other men are hugging, wishing each other well, but I hold myself apart. There are only a dozen of us, so it is easy to take a seat distanced from the others.
My stomach is queasy as we head for the Temple of the Waters, and not just from last night’s drinking. Our route takes us along the edge of the women’s quarter and none of us are wearing veils. I slouch in my seat. Several of the men pull their robes up over their noses; others put their hands on their heads, or pretend to rub their faces. The priest’s assistant, who misses nothing, points this out to them and they all laugh. But I can only think that perhaps Ali is sitting in another bus without her veil on either; and I wonder if her mouth is as round and full as her gray eyes, if the arch of her lips matches that of her brow, if the curve of her neck is as graceful as the bridge of her nose. Would I even recognize her? I do not know.
The Temple of the Waters sits at the center of the government quarter across from the Palace of Congress, an oasis of green and blue marble in a desert of steel and concrete and sandstone. The giant telescreens that surround it show images of the ocean, the surge of waves in calm weather, but they remind me of the storm-tossed gray of Ali’s eyes and I breathe faster.
As we’re climbing off the bus, the priest’s assistant steps in front of me and grips me by the shoulder. Instantly, I know that he saw how I stayed apart, he knows that I am different from the others.
But he only says, “Why don’t you smile? This is going to be a good thing—think of the pride you’ll feel!”
I force myself to smile and pull away from him to follow the others. We strip in the anteroom. A few of the men are as young as I am, but they range in age up to a solemn gray-haired old man who goes about his preparations with all the grim seriousness of a surgeon before a touchy operation. The room is as hot as a sauna and several men grow visibly excited. One man, a boy almost, younger than me, can’t help himself and spills his seed there on the floor. The others chastise him until he starts to cry, but the priest enters through a second door and all fall silent.
Noticing the mess, he says, “Don’t worry, I’m sure there’s more where that came from.”
Everyone laughs and the boy rubs his tears from his cheeks, and grins, and everyone is at ease again; everyone but me. The priest asks how many of us have married before, and most of the men raise their hands.
“Yours is a sacred trust,” the priest tells us. “There are two kinds of people in the world, those to whom society is given, and those who have the sacred duty to give to society, to perpetuate it.”
“Home for the homos,” one of the older men mumbles. “And hide the hydros.”
The priest smiles gently. “Yes, that’s how they mocked you as young men but you have nothing to hide by being different. That’s why we come to the Temple with our faces uncovered. You have a holy trust, a gift from our heavenly father, who felt such love for all creation that he spilled his seed in the primal ocean and brought forth life.”
When I think of the ocean, I think of Ali and stare at the door to the inner chamber, wondering if I will see her here.
“Earlier this morning,” the priest continues, “the women entrusted with their half of this sacred duty came down from their quarter. They entered the main chamber of the temple a short while ago, and even now immerse themselves in the pool. In just a moment it will be your turn to enter. Think of the pride you’ll feel; think of the love you have for our world and the peace therein. Look to the older men who have been here before and do what comes naturally to you.”
Some nervous laughter follows this.
The priest looks at the boy who spilled himself, who is already excited again, and says “Hold on to that a little longer, friend.” A light flashes above the door. “Ah, it is time.”
The men press forward, somehow scooping me up so that I, the most reluctant of them, am at the head of the phalanx.
The doors swing open.
One group of acolytes stand there with towels as we enter, while a second set waits to collect the results of our labor. A womb-shaped pool of bodywarm water fills the center of the circular room. The women have already performed their rituals. Their eggs float in tiny gelatinous clumps on the surface of the pool.
A door identical to ours, but opposite, clicks shut on the women’s chamber. “Hurry now,” the senior priest in the white lab coat says. “Timing is important.”
An acolyte reaches out his gloved hand to help me down the steps into the pool.
There are two kinds of people in the world: homosexuals and hydrosexuals. But I am neither. I stand there like a gray boulder caught between the black sea and the pale white sky as the wave of bachelors breaks around me to crowd the water’s edge.
The Risk-Taking Gene as Expressed by Some Asian Subjects
STEVE TOMASULA
Steve Tomasula [www.nd.edu/~stomasul/] lives in Indiana and teaches at Notre Dame. He is the author of the novels VAS: An Opera in Flatland (University of Chicago Press, 2004)—a hybird image-text novel—and IN & OZ (Ministry of Whimsy Press, 2003)—set in a two-part near-future city in the tradition of Vonnegut’s Ilium in Player Piano, rigidly separated by class. His short fiction has appeared widely, and most recently in The Iowa Review, Fiction International, and McSweeney’s. He is a postmodern writer on the edge of genre, or at least a genre fellow-traveler.
“The Risk-Taking Gene as Expressed by Some Asian Subjects” was published in the Denver Quarterly (Fall 2004), in an issue devoted to fantastic literature but lacking any manifesto or announcement to separate the work from the general run of literary fiction the magazine publishes. We see this as an interesting alternative to the approaches taken by Conjunctions and McSweeney’s in recent years. This is literary hard SF. Using what he thinks of as a homogenous population in Chinatown, a researcher is trying to demonstrate a connection between answers to his questionnaire and a certain genetic marker for what he considers a risk-taking gene. Nothing is as simple as it appears to him.
Their shirts had the uniform neatness of suburbia: chemically fortified green, polo. White father, mother, symmetrical children and other markers of the statistically tidy. Seeing their contrast to the thrown-together character of the Three Happiness #1 Chinese Restaurant we had each in turn stumbled upon, I couldn’t help but wonder if the great fattening in comfort won by Western nations has not been paid for by an equal narrowing of imagination. Not an imagination to create wealth, or even scientific knowledge, for in this we Westerners obviously live at a time of genius. Rather, I refer to an imagination—or call it a gut feeling—that can so powerfully apprehend an other world that the dreamer risks all and leaps!—a blindfolded trapeze artist without a net!—sure that the trapeze swing he has flung himself after, a world he has never actually seen, will be there when he closes his grip.
The waitress, a dried apple of a woman with no English, bowed to her guests as she had welcomed me. But instead of following her shuffle to the table a busboy had reluctantly gotten up to wipe, they stood gaping at the surrounding shabbiness: American colonial and other mismatched chairs (refugees no doubt from some doomed IHOP); faux windows, their Colonial frames now painted red and gold; and paper lanterns that were as ashen as the old Chinese men sagging about the other tables, squinting through the smoke of their cigarettes at the new arrivals as if a decision to stay or go would be the most dramatic thing they would witness in this the Year of the Snake.
“Gin zhuo,” the waitress insisted. To no avail. The sight of the table being set with chopsticks sent the family off in search of a restaurant more in keeping with the souvenirs they carried while the old men returned to their tea, their Chinese newspapers, their cigarettes.
“Ha!” one exclaimed to no one, as if he had won a wager against himself.
Just then a great clatter of men swept in, talking Chinese in a loud, celebratory manner. The busboy sprang to action, joined by the waitress who left her water pitcher sweating on the mythological constellations and dragons printed on the paper placemat beneath my own lunch.
That a certain kind of risky imagination has been supplanted by a more pragmatic one can be seen in the way we Westerners read our stars, I considered, as the men noisily rearranged the Colonial chairs of the restaurant, chasing a few of the old men to other tables to do so. Whereas the ancient Chinese saw dragons in their sky—those guardians of hidden mysteries—whereas the Hindus looked up to the same stars and saw Agni the fire god in gymnastic couplings with the wives of the Seven Sages, we here in the pragmatic West are taught to see a big dipper. And as if to confirm our paucity of vision, when we look to the stars nearest this dipper we see another dipper, smaller.
