27 Short Stories Read online

  "Then be dizzy. Think of it as your mind finding a way for you to run."

  "You don't understand, Mr. Therapist. I thought you'd understand."

  "I'm trying to."

  "If I go with her, then I'll be dead." ***

  I asked her nurse, "Who's been reading to her?"

  "We all do, and volunteers from town. They like her. She always has someone to read to her."

  "You'd better supervise them more carefully. Somebody's been putting ideas in her head. About spaceships and dust and singing between the starg. It's seared her pretty bad."

  The nurse frowned. "We approve everything they read. She's been reading that kind of thing for years. It's never done her any harm before. Why now?"

  "The rain, I guess. Cooped up in here, she's losing touch with reality."

  The nurse nodded sympathetically and said, "I know. When she's asleep, she's doing the strangest things now."

  "Like what? What kind of things?"

  "Oh, singing these horrible songs."

  "What are the words?"

  "There aren't any words. She just sort of hums. Only the melodies are awful. Not even like music. And her voice gets funny and raspy. She's completely asleep. She sleeps a lot now. Mercifully, I think. She's always gotten impatient when she can't go outside."

  The nurse obviously liked Elaine. It would be hard not to feel sorry for her, but Elaine insisted on being liked, and people liked her, those that could get over the horrible flatness of the sheets all around her trunk. "Listen," I said. "Can we bundle her up or something? Get her outside in spite of the rain?"

  The nurse shook her head. "It isn't just the rain. It's cold out there. And the explosion that made her like she is -- it messed her up inside. She isn't put together right. She doesn't have the strength to fight off any kind of disease at all. You understand -- there's a good chance that exposure to that kind of weather would kill her eventually. And I won't take a chance on that."

  "I'm going to be visiting her more often, then," I said. "As often as I can. She's got something going on in her head that's scaring her half to death. She thinks she's going to die."

  "Oh, the poor darling," the nurse said. "Why would she think that?" "Doesn't matter. One of her imaginary friends may be getting out of hand."

  "I thought you said they were harmless."

  "They were."

  When I left the Millard County Rest Home that night, I stopped back in Elaine's room. She was asleep, and I heard her song. It was eerie. I could hear, now and then themes from the bit of Copland music she had listened to. But it was distorted, and most of the music was unrecognizable -- wasn't even music. Her voice was high and strange, and then suddenly it would change, would become low and raspy, and for a moment I clearly heard in her voice the sound of a vast engine coming through walls of metal, carried on slender metal rods, the sound of a great roar being swallowed up by a vast cushion of nothing. I pictured Elaine with wires coming out of her shoulders and hips, with her head encased in metal and her eyes closed in sleep, like her imaginary Anansa, piloting the starship as if it were her own body. I could see that this would be attractive to Elaine, in a way. After all, she hadn't been born this way. She had memories of running and playing, memories of feeding herself and dressing herself, perhaps even of learning to read, of sounding out the words as her fingers touched each letter. Even the false arms of a spaceship would be something to fill the great void.

  Children's centers are not inside their bodies; their centers are outside, at the point where the fingers of the left hand and the fingers of the right hand meet. What they touch is where they live; what they see is their self. And Elaine had lost herself in an explosion before she had the chance to move inside. With this strange dream of Anansa she was getting a self back.

  But a repellent self, for all that. I walked in and sat by Elaine's bed, listening to her sing. Her body moved slightly, her back arching a little with the melody. High and light; low and rasping. The sounds alternated, and I wondered what they meant. What was going on inside her to make this music come out?

  If I go with her, then I'll be dead.

  Of course she was afraid. I looked at the lump of flesh that filled the bed shapelessly below where her head emerged from the covers. I tried to change my perspective, to see her body as she saw it, from above. It almost disappeared then, with the foreshortening and the height of her ribs making her stomach and hint of hips vanish into insignificance. Yet this was all she had, and if she believed -- and certainly she seemed to -- that surrendering to the fantasy of Anansa would mean the death of this pitiful body, is death any less frightening to those who have not been able to fully live? I doubt it. At least for Elaine, what life she had lived had been joyful. She would not willingly trade it for a life of music and metal arms, locked in her own mind. Except for the rain. Except that nothing was so real to her as the outside, as the trees and birds and distant hills, and as the breeze touching her with a violence she permitted to no living person. And with that reality, the good part of her life, cut off from her by the rain, how long could she hold out against the incessant pulling of Anansa and her promise of arms and legs and eternal song?

  I reached up, on a whim, and very gently lifted her eyelids.

  Her eyes remained open, staring at the ceiling, not blinking.

  I closed her eyes, and they remained closed.

  I turned her head, and it stayed turned. She did not wake up. just kept singing as if I had done nothing to her at all.

  * * *

  On Friday it looked as if the clouds were breaking, but after only a few minutes of sunshine a huge new bank of clouds swept down from the northwest and it was worse than before. I finished my work rather carelessly, stopping a sentence in the middle several times. One of my patients was annoyed with me. She squinted at me. "You're not paid to think about your woman troubles when you're talking to me." I apologized and tried to pay attention. She was a talker; my attention always wandered. But she was right in a way. I couldn't stop thinking of Elaine. And my patient's saying that about woman troubles must have triggered something in my mind. After all, my relationship with Elaine was the longest and closest I had had with a woman in many years. If you could think of Elaine as a woman.

  Catatonia, or the beginning of catalepsy. She's losing her mind, I thought, and if I don't bring her back, keep her here somehow, Anansa will win, and the rest home will be caring for a lump of mindless flesh for the next however many years they can keep tlns remnant of Elaine alive.

  "I'll be back on Saturday," I told the administrator. "Why so soon?"

  "Elaine is going through a crisis of some kind," I explained. An imaginary woman from space wants to carry her off -- that I didn't say. "Have the nurses keep her awake as much as they can. Read to her, play with her, talk to her. Her normal hours at night are enough. Avoid naps."

  "Why?"

  "I'm afraid for her, that's all. She could go catatonic on us at any time, I think. Her sleeping isn't normal. I want to have her watched all the time." "This is really serious?" "This is really serious." On Saturday I drove back to Millard County and found the nurses rather

  distraught. They didn't realize how much she was sleeping until they tried to stop her, they all said. She was dozing off for two or three naps in the mornings, even more in the afternoons. She went to sleep at night at seven-thirty and slept at least twelve hours. "Singing all the time. It's awful. Even at night she keeps it up. Singing and singing."

  But she was awake when I went in to see her. "I stayed awake for you." "Thanks," I said. "A Saturday visit. I must really be going bonkers." "Actually, no. But I don't like how sleepy you are." She smiled wanly. "It isn't my idea." I think my smile was more cheerful than hers. "And I think it's all in your head." "Think what you like, Doctor." "I'm not a doctor. My degree says I'm a master." "How deep is the water outside?" "Deep?" "All this rain. Surely it's enough to keep a few dozen arks afloat. Is God

  destroying the world?" "Unfort
unately, no. Though He has killed the engines on a few cars that went a

  little fast through the puddles." "How long would it have to rain to fill up the world?" "The world is round. It would all drip off the bottom." She laughed. It was good to hear her laugh, but it ended too abruptly, and she

  looked at me fearfully. "I'm going, you know." "You are?"

  "I'm just the right size. She's measured me, and I'll fit perfectly. She has just the place for me. It's a good place, where I can hear the music of the dust for myself, and learn to sing it. I'd have the directional engines."

  I shook my head. "Grunty the ice pig was cute. This isn't cute, Elaine."

  "Did I ever say I thought Anansa was cute? Grunty the ice pig was real, you know. My father made hun out of crushed ice for a luau. He melted before they got the pig out of the ground. I don't make my friends up."

  "Fuchsia the flower girl?"

  "My mother would pinch blossoms off the fuchsia by our front door. We played with them like dolls in the grass."

  "But not Anansa."

  "Anansa came into my mind when I was asleep. She found me. I didn't make her up."

  "Don't you see, Elaine, that's how the real hallucinations come? They feel like reality."

  She shook her head. "I know all that. I've had the nurses read me psychology books. Anansa is -- Anansa is other. She couldn't come out of my head. She's something else. She's real. I've heard her music. It isn't plain, like Copland. It isn't false."

  "Elaine, when you were asleep on Wednesday, you were becoming catatonic."

  "I know."

  "You know?"

  "I felt you touch me. I felt you turn my head. I wanted to speak to you, to say good-bye. But she was singing, don't you see? She was singing. And now she lets me sing along. When I sing with her, I can feel myself travel out, like a spider along a single thread, out into the place where she is. Into the darkness. It's lonely there, and black, and cold, but I know that at the end of the thread there she'll be, a friend for me forever."

  "You're frightening me, Elaine." "There aren't any trees on her starship, you know. That's how I stay here. I think of the trees and the hills and the birds and the grass and the wind, and how I'd lose all of that. She gets angry at me, and a little hurt. But it keeps me here. Except now I can hardly remember the trees at all. I try to remember, and it's like trying to remember the face of my mother. I can remember her dress and her hair, but her face is gone forever. Even when I look at a picture, it's a stranger. The trees are strangers to me now."

  I stroked her forehead. At first she pulled her head away, then slid it back.

  "I'm sorry," she said. "I usually don't like people to touch me there."

  "I won't," I said.

  "No, go ahead. I don't mind."

  So I stroked her forehead again. It was cool and dry, and she lifted her head almost imperceptibly, to receive my touch. Involuntarily I thought of what the old woman had sad the day before. Woman troubles. I was touching Elaine, and I thought of making love to her. I immediately put the thought out of my mind.

  "Hold me here," she said. "Don't let me go. I want to go so badly. But I'm not meant for that. I'm just the right size, but not the right shape. Those aren't my arms. I know what my arms felt like."

  "I'll hold you if I can. But you have to help."

  "No drugs. The drugs pull my mind away from my body. If you give me drugs, I'll die."

  "Then what can I do?"

  "Just keep me here, any way you can."

  Then we talked about nonsense, because we had been so serious, and it was as if she weren't having any problems at all. We got on to the subject of the church meetings.

  "I didn't know you were religious," I said.

  "I'm not. But what else is there to do on Sunday? They sing hymns, and I sing with them. Last Sunday there was a sermon that really got to me. The preacher talked about Christ in the sepulchre. About Him being there three days before the angel came to let Him go. I've been thinking about that, what it must have been like for Him, locked in a cave in the darkness, completely alone." "Depressing."

  "Not really. It must have been exhilarating for Him, in a way. If it was true, you know. To he there on that stone bed, saying to Himself, 'They thought I was dead, but I'm here. I'm not dead.'"

  "You make Him sound smug."

  "Sure. Why not? I wonder if I'd feel like that, if I were with Anansa."

  Anansa again.

  "I can see what you're thinking. You're thinking, 'Anansa again.'"

  "Yeah," I said. "I wish you'd erase her and go back to some more harmless friends."

  Suddenly her face went angry and fierce.

  "You can believe what you like. Just leave me alone."

  I tried to apologize, but she wouldn't have any of it. She insisted on believing in this star woman. Finally I left, redoubling my cautions against letting her sleep. The nurses looked worried, too. They could see the change as easily as I could.

  That night, because I was in Millard on a weekend, I called up Belinda. She wasn't married or anything at the moment. She came to my motel. We had dinner, made love, and watched television. She watched television, that is. I lay on the bed, thinking. And so when the test pattern came on and Belinda at last got up, beery and passionate, my mind was still on Elaine. As Belinda kissed and tickled me and whispered stupidity in my ear, I imagined myself without arms and legs. I lay there, moving only my head.

  "What is the matter, you don't want to?"

  I shook off the mood. No need to disappoint Belinda -- I was the one who had called her. I had a responsibility. Not much of one, though. That was what was at me. I made love to Belinda slowly and carefully, but with my eyes closed. I kept superimposing Elaine's face on Behnda's. Woman troubles. Even though Belinda's fingers played up and down my back, I thought I was making love to Elaine. And the stumps of arms and legs didn't revolt me as much as I would have thought. Instead, I only felt sad. A deep sense of tragedy, of loss, as if Elaine were dead and I could have saved her, like the prince in all the fairy tales; a kiss, so symbolic, and the princess awakens and lives happily ever after. And I hadn't done it. I had failed her. When we were finished, I cried. "Oh, you poor sweetheart," Belinda said, her voice rich with sympathy. "What's wrong -- you don't have to tell me." She cradled me for a while, and at last I went to sleep with my head pressed against her breasts. She thought I needed her. I suppose that, briefly, I did.

  I did not go back to Elaine on Sunday as I had planned. I spent the entire day almost going. Instead of walking out the door, I sat and watched the incredible array of terrible Sunday morning television. And when I finally did go out, fully intending to go to the rest home and see how she was doing, I ended up driving, luggage in the back of the car, to my trailer, where I went inside and again sat down and watched television.

  Why couldn't I go to her?

  Just keep me here, she had said. Any way you can, she had said.

  And I thought I knew the way. That was the problem. In the back of my mind all this was much too real, and the fairy tales were wrong. The prince didn't wake her with a kiss. He wakened the princess with a promise: In his arms she would be safe forever. She awoke for the happily ever after. if she hadn't known it to be true, the princess would have preferred to sleep forever.

  What was Elaine asking of me?

  Why was I afraid of it?

  Not my job. Unprofessional to get emotionally involved with a patient.

  But then, when had I ever been a professional? I finally went to bed, wishing I had Belinda with me again, for whatever comfort she could bring. Why weren't all women like Belinda, soft and loving and undemanding?

  Yet as I drifted off to sleep, it was Elaine I remembered, Elaine's face and hideous, reproachful stump of a body that followed me through all my dreams.

  And she followed me when I was awake, through my regular rounds on Monday and Tuesday, and at last it was Wednesday, and still I was afraid to go to the Millard County Rest Home. I
didn't get there until afternoon. Late afternoon, and the rain was coming down as hard as ever, and there were lakes of standing water in the fields, torrents rushing through the unprepared gutters of the town.

  "You're late," the administrator said.

  "Rain," I answered, and he nodded. But he looked worried. "We hoped you'd come yesterday, but we couldn't reach you anywhere. It's Elaine."

  And I knew that my delay had served its damnable purpose, exactly as I expected.

  "She hasn't woken up since Monday morning. She just lies there, singing. We've got her on an IV. She's asleep."

  She was indeed asleep. I sent the others out of the room.

  "Elaine," I said.

  Nothing.

  I called her name again, several times. I touched her, rocked her head back and forth. Her head stayed wherever I placed it. And the song went on, softly, high and then low, pure and then gravelly. I covered her mouth. She sang on, even with her mouth closed, as if nothing were the matter.

  I pulled down her sheet and pushed a pin into her belly, then into the thin flesh at, her collarbone. No response. I slapped her face. No response. She was gone. I saw her again, connected to a starship, only this time I understood better. It wasn't her body that was the right size; it was her mind. And it was her mind that had followed the slender spider's thread out to Anansa, who waited to give her a body.

  A job.

  Shock therapy? I imagined her already-deformed body leaping and arching as the electricity coursed through her. It would accomplish nothing, except to torture unthinking flesh. Drugs? I couldn't think of any that could bring her back from where she had gone. In a way, I think, I even believed in Anansa, for the moment. I called her name. "Anansa, let her go. Let her come back to me. Please. I need her."

  Why had I cried in Belinda's arms? Oh, yes. Because I had seen the princess and let her lie there unawakened, because the happily ever after was so damnably much work.

  I did not do it in the fever of the first realization that I had lost her. It was no act of passion or sudden fear or grief. I sat beside her bed for hours, looking at her weak and helpless body, now so empty. I wished for her eyes to open on their own, for her to wake up and say, "Hey, would you believe the dream I had!" For her to say, "Fooled you, didn't I? It was really hard when you poked me with pins, but I fooled you." But she hadn't fooled me.