Complete Short Fiction, page 61
“So that’s my idea, and in an hour or so we’ll find out if it’s true. I’ve convinced the captain it’s worth a try, and she’s brought in the other Confederation ships, so at the very least I will be the center of a fairly expensive little drama of my own.” Balcescu stood then, his helmet under his arm as though he were some kind of antique cavalier. “Sorry I couldn’t explain this to you in person, but as I said, it’s been a busy last forty-eight hours or so, putting together my hypothesis and then getting ready to test it.” He turned toward the door. “But I did want to thank you, Mr. Jatt. You opened my eyes in a couple of ways, and that doesn’t happen very often.”
I’ll bet it doesn’t, I thought, but suddenly I wished I’d told him my first name.
“And now one of two things are going to happen,” the recorded Balcescu said. “Either I’m wrong somehow—about the purpose of that ship, or about how realistic and thorough its defenses are, in which case by the time you see this I’ll have been delatticed, as Diana puts it. Or, I’ll be right, and I’ll be able to use the little bit of Company language I’ve put together, along with some useful algorithms from Dr. Swainsea, to override the programming and cancel the show, as it were.” He moved to the door of his cabin, so that he stood just at edge of the recorded picture. “And if I succeed with that, then I’m going to start looking for some kind of emergency return pod. You see, the Confederation are welcome to the ship itself. I don’t give a damn about how it works or how far it came to get here or anything of the things they want to know. I just want to go where the show is happening—where the opera, or religious passion play, or children’s game, or whatever this thing represents, is really going on. I’m hoping that the Company has some kind of recoverable module—like a ship’s black box—and that it will return to their space, wherever that might be. I intend to be on it.
“How could I miss that chance? A whole new culture, language, and even more important, a whole new art form! Nine muses aren’t going to be enough anymore, Mr. Jatt. So that’s why this recording, my friend. Either way, I wanted to say thank you—and good-bye.” And with that, the recorded Balcescu held out his comm wand and the recording went black.
Maybe he hadn’t guessed how soon I’d watch the recording—maybe he was still on the alien ship. I commed the captain’s cabin, but she was on the observation deck with everyone else, celebrating. I rushed up, but be fore I could say a thing to Captain Watanabe or any of the other officers, I spotted Dr. Swainsea leaning against the biggest view-portal looking out at the jellyfish ship, so strange, so large, so distant.
“Doc . . . Doc . . .!” I called as I ran up.
“I know, Rahul,” she said without turning. “Look—there it goes.” She pointed. I thought I could see a dim streak of light moving away from the alien ship—but not toward the Visser ring, I was surprised to see. “God only knows what kind of path those things travel,” she said. “Well, Stefan will find out soon enough.”
“You knew what he was going to do?”
“Of course. I helped him.” She looked at me. “Oh, Rahul, what else was I going to do? Beg him to stay? We had . . . maybe the beginning of something. How could that compete against a Big Idea, especially for a man who lived for big ideas? No, I couldn’t have asked him and he couldn’t have agreed—we both would have hated ourselves. You’ll understand someday.”
I understand now, I wanted to say, but everyone needs to tell their own story their own way. You don’t have to be six feet tall to know that. “It was just . . .” I shook my head. “At first I didn’t like him. But then, I kind of thought he and I might be . . . we might . . .”
“It might have been the beginning of a beautiful friendship?” she asked. Something in my expression must have amused her, because she laughed. “You don’t think you’re the only one who watches old pictures, do you?”
“I guess not.” I frowned. “I think Balcescu’s crazy, anyway. We’ve already got music and art and Fred Astaire and Katharine Hepburn and Howard Hawks—do we even need a tenth muse?”
“I need a drink,” she said. “Then maybe I’ll feel a little bit less like Ingrid Bergman.”
We walked across the observation deck, threading our way through the happy crew members, many of whom were already well into the champagne. She still looked sad, so I reached up and took Doc Swainsea’s hand . . . Diana’s hand. Lose a friend, make a friend. Sometimes life does imitate art, I guess.
“Well,” I told her—my best Bogart—“whatever else happens, we’ll always have Rainwater Hub.”
Ants!
Everybody knows someone like Karl Eggar, a man with the right answers for everyone else’s problems—or at least so he thinks—but who never gets as much respect as he thinks he deserves. This weekend, though, that’s all about to change for Karl. He’s going to be proved right in a way even he couldn’t have expected. . . .
It feels good to swing hard, to feel his muscles flex and the blade of the ax bite deep into the wood. It feels even better that it’s the old apple tree, the one whose apples have never been any damn good, puny and sour. But the blossoms, she always says, it blossoms so nice—it makes the whole yard look pretty! Yeah, and who gives a crap about that?
Well, today he’s made his mind up. If there’s one upside of having lost his job down at the salvage yard, it’s that he doesn’t have to pretend to care about anything around here that isn’t pulling its weight. The apple tree is a perfect example: a few useless blossoms versus the need to bring down the heating bills next winter equals the tree is history.
As he finishes setting the cut wood onto the pile, which is getting impressively high, he sees her watching from the window. Oh, God, that face. Like he was killing a family dog instead of just taking down an old eyesore of an apple tree. He gives her a mocking smile and wave, a little twiddle of the fingers. She turns away.
He married her. He must have—everybody tells him so. But he doesn’t really remember it happening and certainly doesn’t remember why. Sometimes, listening to her complain about all the things that (according to her) he should have done and hasn’t, or shouldn’t have done but did anyway, he has a sudden fantasy of just taking a big old swing at her with his fist, like something out of a Popeye cartoon, hitting her so hard she just flies away and he never has to hear that voice again.
He even sees it with a caption, like one of those rumpled, xeroxed cartoons they used to pass around at the yard in the days before the Internet: “Bitch in Space.”
“That’s just great, Karl,” she tells him as he comes in and sets the ax in the corner of the kitchen. It needs to go out to the garage to be oiled and resharpened and put away properly, but he’s going to have a beer first because he goddamn well deserves it. He wipes sweat from his face and the back of his neck. Maybe two beers. He’s had only a couple today so far and it is Saturday. Is there some law that says you have to have a job to enjoy a few beers on Saturday?
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“Just great. Spend an hour chopping down a harmless tree for firewood in the middle of July instead of doing something useful. It’s ninety goddamn degrees outside—what do we need firewood for?”
He ignores her, feels the beer sliding down his throat, icy and perfect. If only there were a way to pour cold beer over his whole life. Yeah, drown the bitch with it . . . or at least drown her out.
“Have you done any of the other things I asked you to do? Did you call the exterminator?”
“We don’t need any goddamn exterminator. Do you know what those cheating bastards charge? It’s just a few ants.”
“Just a few?” She stares at him like he’s crazy. “If you were ever in here for any longer than than it takes to open another beer, you might have noticed that we’re being overrun by the creepy little things. Look. Look!” She’s waving her arm like her turn indicator is broken. He rolls his eyes, which just makes her more pissed off. “Look in that sink, damn you!”
He takes a long swallow of his beer, hitches his pants up, rubs some sweat from the small of his back, and ambles over to the sink. It really would be nice just to plant her one, a shot in the nose to straighten her right up. Yeah, he’d probably go to jail, that’s the way things are nowadays, but oh my God it would be like a dream come true. . . . “So what?”
“Do you happen to notice about a thousand ants in there?” She points at them like he’s stupid—like he really doesn’t see them. “And in the cabinets, and on the table, and all over the floor. It’s gross, Karl, it’s goddamned gross and disgusting! I can’t walk across the kitchen without stepping on hundreds of the things!”
“So why do you want to pay an exterminator if you’re doing it yourself?” A good one. He laughs.
She slaps him stingingly on the arm. “You’re not funny, you mean bastard!”
For an instant—just an instant, but it rushes through him like a wildfire—he almost does hit her. Things go a little bit upside down, like when he sometimes gets up too quickly, gets dizzy, and almost falls. “Don’t . . . don’t you ever do that again,” he tells her, with enough of his true feelings in his voice that she backs away a few steps, like a dog trying to decide whether to bolt.
“I want those things out of here, Karl,” she says, but whining now like a stuck-up kid. “They’re disgusting.”
“Oh, they’re in the sink, isn’t that too bad,” he says, mocking her. “Did it ever occur to you, you lazy bitch, that all you have to do is turn on the water and wash ’em down the drain?” He does, using the rinsing hose to send all the little, leggy black creatures sliding and swooshing away to a watery death. “Bye-bye, you little fuckers.” He turns to her. “See? Problem solved.”
She’s gone pale now, her face cold and hard. She hates it when he calls her “bitch”—as if it wasn’t the best possible name for someone like her, someone who was pretty damn cute in high school but has long since gone fat and mouthy, just like her chain-smoking, vodka-gargling mother, but who also puts on airs like she’s too good for him because she watches Oprah and reads an occasional book.
“Why are you so hateful, Karl? It’s not just ants in the sink.” Her voice starts to rise. “What about the ones on the floor? What about the ones on the counter, and in the damn cabinets, and in the goddamned sugar bowl, Karl? Huh? What about that?”
Why don’t they think? he wonders. Why can’t they think? Because all this Oprah, Dr. Phil, everything’s-about-feelings bullshit clouds their minds, that’s why. Not a one of them can think about things logically, make a plan, solve a problem. . . . “Oh, Jesus, shut your mouth for just a minute, Norah—I know it’s hard for you, but try—and I’ll show you what to do with the goddamn sugar bowl.”
The ants trek across the table in a wavering line. You have to admire their focus, if nothing else, he thinks. They’re like him, in a way—small, maybe, but tough and strong and well organized. They’re carrying little grains of sugar from the bowl across the table and down onto the floor, then off to their nest or hive or whatever they have. It’s kind of funny, really. If you’re an ant, finding that sugar bowl must be like winning the lottery.
He puts his hand under the sugar bowl to lift it. The plastic table cover is sticky and it grabs at the hairs on the back of his hand. Something hot and red flares in him again. “No wonder we got ants everywhere. This place is filthy. Now, pay attention, stupid, and I’ll show you something. Ants in the sugar bowl, big problem? I don’t think so.” He goes to the sink and dumps out the sugar, stands for a moment, sweat on his face and his heart beating strangely as he watches the little black shapes dig out of the pile of white crystals on the floor of the basin. Then he sluices them away with the rinsing hose.
“Empty the sugar bowl,” she said. “Real clever, Karl. God, it’s just like you always say, men are just smarter. I wonder why I never thought of it? And when I want to put sugar in my coffee, or on my cereal, why, I’ll just go scrape it out of the drain. Brilliant.”
He isn’t going to look at her because if he does, he’s probably going to smack the shit out of her. He only ever did it once before, when they were first together. She came back from her mother’s after two weeks and they didn’t talk about it again. She hadn’t seen Oprah in those days.
“Just because you don’t use sugar doesn’t mean I don’t want to use it, Karl.” She was still using that voice, the one that made his hairs stand on end. “They’re into the sugar bag in the cabinet, too, but I’m sure you thought of that already with your superior male logical intelligence. So tell me, Mr. Spock, am I just supposed to give up sugar entirely?”
Wouldn’t do you any harm, you fat bitch, he thinks. His head hurts and he doesn’t really want to talk anymore. He wants another beer, maybe two—shit, maybe four—and then he wants to go sit in the living room and watch the baseball game, or wrestling, or anything that means he won’t have to think about any of this.
“Shut up and look,” he tells her. “Just . . . shut up. I’m warning you.” Mr. Spock, huh? Compared to the crap that fills her head, he is an alien genius. His teeth are clenched so hard now that it’s making the headache worse. He rinses the sugar bowl, dries it off with a paper towel, then refills it from the sugar bag after flicking off a few six-legged explorers. It’s the hot weather. The ground gets dry and the little bastards come in looking for water, but then find out where all the good stuff is. Little shits. His moment of identification with the ants is long gone. Just somebody else who wants to rip him off.
When the clean, dry sugar bowl is full of clean, dry sugar, he takes it to the dish cabinet and rummages around until he finds a bowl large enough for it to sit in comfortably. Then, with it nesting there like a small boat in a bigger boat, he fills the outer bowl with water and holds the whole arrangement out for Norah to see.
“Get it?” He points to the inch-wide span of water now ringing the sugar bowl. Karl is pleased to get the last word for once—he couldn’t have proved his case against her lazy thinking more completely if he’d had a chance to prepare in advance. There’s absolutely no way for her to refute this evidence. “It’s like a moat around a castle, see? The ants can’t get to the sugar bowl. They try to cross the water, they drown. No ants in the sugar. Get it, Norah? Get it?”
He’s about to set the sugar bowl back on the table when he remembers the stickiness that had sucked at his arm. He wipes the sweat from his forehead. Bad enough the heat, but the whole goddamn house is sticky, too. Ants? The way she cleans, they probably have roaches. . . . Karl puts the sugar bowl up on top of the refrigerator, then pulls the plaid cover off the kitchen table and holds it out toward her. “Go on, make yourself useful. Clean this shit up, the ants won’t even want to get on the table. It’s only because you keep this place like a pigsty. . . .”
He picks up his ax and starts toward the garage. The headache is beginning to ease.
“You . . . you bastard!” she shrieks. “You stupid, ignorant bastard! Those damn ants are everywhere! What am I supposed to do, bring in the hose and just fill the house with water? Is that what you’re saying?”
He’s not going to argue anymore. He showed her—he shut her up—so why won’t she stay that way?
“Don’t walk out on me!” She’s screaming louder now, that voice like a dentist’s drill—he swears he can feel it buzzing in his fillings. “Don’t you dare!”
“Shut your damn mouth or I’ll slap you silly.” He tries to get the garage door open but she’s blocking his path. He grabs her arm and yanks her out of the way. The garage beckons like a cave, dark and cool, quiet and safe. Then he feels her fingernails in the skin of his neck, burning, sharp, and her other hand in a rude little fist, smacking away at the back of his head.
“Don’t you dare turn your back on me, Karl Eggar, you ignorant pig! Don’t you dare! Don’t you . . .!”
And suddenly something just expands inside him, a great, hot plume like the blast that leveled Hiroshima. He can feel it blaze up through the whole length of his upper body, out of his guts and up his spine and out the top of his head, rising like a mushroom cloud. He has the ax in his hand and suddenly everything has turned hot; the very air is blazing like an oven. Everything is flow, and noise, and movement, and all of it is glowing red—a single, hot, moving, expanding thing, with him helpless in its midst, helpless but laughing as the ax rises and falls, over and over again. Each time it strikes it makes a sound—skutch, skutch, skutch—as satisfying as sinking a steak knife into a thick porterhouse. He can’t stop laughing. Heat and the glorious pounding—the pounding! He feels like he is hammering the world in half.
For a long time after he has finished swinging, Karl only stands, the ax now hanging in his hands, heavy as an iron girder. His limbs tingle; even his scalp prickles. He is drained, as bonelessly weary as if he has just had a ten-minute orgasm. But there is a . . . thing . . . on the floor. No, many things, one big and the rest in all kinds of sizes and shapes. It’s hard to make out details because the kitchen is very messy. The walls are spattered and dripping red. Red everywhere.
The exhilaration is beginning to wear off. He sinks into a crouch in the middle of one of the larger scarlet puddles. The strangest, thickest, saltiest smell is in his nose. He’s trying to think, staring at what’s left of his wife. Call an ambulance? No point. No ambulance in the world is going to do any good. All the kings horses and all the king’s men aren’t going to put . . . that . . .
He wretches up what is in his stomach, a slurry of beer and less identifiable components. The smell combines with the blood and suddenly he is on his side in the warm red goo, unable to do anything further until he has emptied his stomach to its lining, until he is gagging out air and streams of mucus. Then, numb and unable to think about much of anything, he staggers to his feet, drops his shoes and clothes where he stands, then steps carefully over the abstract red splatters as he leaves the kitchen.
