Текст книги "Woman on the Edge of Time"

Автор книги: Marge Piercy

Соавторы: Marge Piercy
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Текущая страница: 5 (всего у книги 26 страниц)

“The door’s locked. Or do you have a key?”

“Not a walk here or now. I wish to invite you home with me for a short visit Say an hour?”

“You mean the way you come here?”

“Wouldn’t you like to see my village?”

“I’d like seeing anything but these four filthy walls, believe me. But could I get back?” She hooted with laughter. “Why should I care? Better if I get stuck anyplace instead of rotting here!”

“Sadly, you can’t get stuck in my time. A lapse of attent would probably break our contact.” Luciente rose gracefully and extended his hand for her to grasp. “As I’ve remarked, the appearance is not a physical presence, but is … as if it were. Now we’ll see if this trick works. To confess, I haven’t a wispy guess if I can really pull you into my time. But the worst that can happen is that we open our eyes and are still in this drab room. Only fit for a storeroom for machinery!”

“You ought to try it twenty‑four hours a day. It breaks you, finally.”

“Then why did you come here? It seems inadequate.”

“I didn’t walk, you can count on that. I was dragged screaming. My brother Luis committed me.”

“Our madhouses are places where people retreat when they want to go down into themselves–to collapse, carry on, see visions, hear voices of prophecy, bang on the walls, relive infancy–getting in touch with the buried self and the inner mind. We all lose parts of ourselves. We all make choices that go bad … . How can another person decide that it is time for me to disintegrate, to reintegrate myself?”

“Here you get put in if your family doesn’t want you around or other people don’t, and that’s about the long and short of it.” She finally stuck out her hand and let Luciente pull her to her feet.

“The first time is supposed to be the hardest, but frankly, we’re the first contacts to try. That’s the theory anyway, for what it weighs. Here comes the practice, NINO.”

“Nino? Niсo?”

“NINO: Nonsense In, Nonsense Out–that’s the motto on every kenner. It means your theory is no better than your practice, or your body than your nutrition. Your encyclopedia only produces the information or misinformation fed it. So on.” Luciente gently drew her against him and held her in his arms so their foreheads touched. “You’re supposed to be a top catcher and I’m supposed to be a superstrong sender … . As people say, with theory and a nail, you’ve got a nail.”

Pressed reluctantly, nervously against Luciente, she felt the coarse fabric of his shirt and … breasts! She jumped back.

“You’re a woman! No, one of those sex‑change operations.”

“If you hop around, we’ll never get it right … . Of course I’m female.” Luciente looked a little disgusted.

She stared at Luciente. Now she could begin to see him/her as a woman. Smooth hairless cheeks, shoulder‑length thick black hair, and the same gentle Indian face. With a touch of sarcasm she said, “You’re well muscled for a woman.” In anger she turned on her heel and stalked a few paces away. A dyke, of course. That bar in Chicago where the Chicana dykes hung out shooting pool and cursing like men, passing comments on the women who walked by. Yet they had never given her that sense of menace a group of men would–after all, under the clothes they were only women too.

“I’m not unusually strong.” Luciente’s face was screwed up with confusion. She still held out her hands to draw Connie to her. “About middling. We do more physical work than most people did in your time, I believe. It’s healthier, and of course you lugs were burning up all those fossil fuels … . You seem surprised that I am female?”

Feeling like a fool, Connie did not choose to reply. Instead she paced to the locked door with its peephole and then to the radiator. Luciente spoke, she moved with that air of brisk unself‑conscious authority Connie associated with men. Luciente sat down, taking up more space than women ever did. She squatted, she sprawled, she strolled, never thinking about how her body was displayed. It was hard to pace with dignity in the tiny space between the stained mattress and the wall. Connie no longer felt in the least afraid of Luciente.

“Please, Connie.” Luciente came over and cautiously put an arm around her shoulders. “I don’t understand what’s wrong. Let’s give it a try. We didn’t even carry out our experiment. Do you really want to stay here all day? It doesn’t bottom you?”

“To the bone.” She stood awkwardly and let Luciente pull her close and lean their foreheads together. Hardly ever did she embrace another woman along the full length of their bodies, and it was hard to ease her mind. She could feel Luciente concentrating, she could feel that cone of energy bearing down on her. It reminded her of the old intensity of a man wanting … something–her body, her time, her comfort–that bearing down that wanted to grab her and push her under. But she was weary and beaten and she let herself yield. What had she to lose?

Although she could sense in Luciente a bridled impatience, the woman held her gently. A harnessed energy to be doing drove this plant geneticist with breasts like a fertility goddess under the coarse fabric of a red work shirt. A woman who liked her: she felt that too. A rough ignorant goodwill caressed her.

Then she smelled salt in the air, a marsh tang. A breeze ruffled the loose rag of dress, chilling her calves. Under her feet she felt stone. A gull mewed, joined by another somewhere above her. Luciente relaxed her grip. “Home free. Will you stand there all day with your eyelids bolted down? Look!”

Rocket ships, skyscrapers into the stratosphere, an underground mole world miles deep, glass domes over everything? She was reluctant to see this world. Voices far, near, laughter, birds, a lot of birds, somewhere a dog barked. Was that–yes, a rooster crowing at midday. That pried her eyes open. A rooster?Fearfully she stared into Luciente’s face, broken open in a grin of triumph. “Where are we?”

“You might try looking around! This is where I live.” Luciente took her by the arm and swung around to her side. “This is our village. Roughly six hundred of us.”

She looked slowly around. She saw … a river, little no‑account buildings, strange structures like long‑legged birds with sails that turned in the wind, a few large terracotta and yellow buildings and one blue dome, irregular buildings, none bigger than a supermarket of her day, an ordinary supermarket in any shopping plaza. The bird objects were the tallest things around and they were scarcely higher than some of the pine trees she could see. A few lumpy free‑form structures overrun with green vines. No skyscrapers, no spaceports, no traffic jam in the sky. “You sure we went in the right direction? Into the future?”

“This is my time, yes! Fasure, look how pretty it is!”

“You live in a village, you said. Way out in the sticks. Like if we went to a city, it’d be … more modern?”

“We don’t have bigcities–they didn’t work. You seem disappointed, Connie?”

“It’s not like I imagined.” Most buildings were small and randomly scattered among trees and shrubbery and gardens, put together of scavenged old wood, old bricks and stones and cement blocks. Many were wildly decorated and overgrown with vines. She saw bicycles and people on foot. Clothes were hanging on lines near a long building–shirts flapping on wash lines! In the distance beyond a blue dome cows were grazing, ordinary black‑and‑white and brown‑and‑white cows chewing ordinary grass past a stone fence. Intensive plots of vegetables began between the huts and stretched into the distance. On a raised bed nearby a dark‑skinned old man was puttering around what looked like spinach plants.

“Got through, uh?” he said to Luciente.

Luciente asked, “Can you see the person from the past?”

“Sure. Had my vision readjusted last month.”

“Zo!” Luciente turned, hopping with excitement. “Good we were cautious in your time. I may be visible there too–that could bring danger!”

“Why isn’t it dangerous for me to be seen here?”

“Everybody knows why you’re here.”

“Everybody except me.” The roofs of the huts–that’s all she could call them–were strange. “What’s on top? Some kind of skylights?”

“Rainwater‑holding and solar energy. Our housing is above ground because of seepage–water table’s close to the surface. We’re almost wetland but not quite, so it’s all right to build here. I’ll show you other villages, different … . I guess, compared to your time, there’s less to see and hear. That time I came down on the streets of Manhattan, I’d thought I’d go deaf! … In a way we could half envy you, such fat, wasteful, thing‑filled times!”

“They aren’t so fat for me.”

“Are you what would be called poor?”

Connie bristled, but then shrugged. “I’ve been down and out for a while. A run of hard times.”

Luciente put an arm around her waist and walked her gently along. A gaudy chicken strutted across the path, followed by another. The path was made of stone fitted against stone in a pattern of subdued natural color. Along it mustard‑yellow flowers were in bloom. Low‑growing tulips were scattered like bright stars on the ground.

She caught the whiff for a moment before she saw them. “Goats! Jesъs y Marнa, this place is like my Tнo Manuel’s in Texas. A bunch of wetback refugees! Goats, chickens running around, a lot of huts scavenged out of real houses and the white folks’ garbage. All that lacks is a couple of old cars up on blocks in the yard! What happened–that big war with atomic bombs they were always predicting?”

“But we like it this way! Oh, Connie, we thought you’d like it too!” Luciente looked upset, her face puckered. “We’d change it if we didn’t like it, how not? We’re always changing things around. As they say, what isn’t living dies … . I’m always quoting homilies. Jackrabbit says my words run out in poppers.” Luciente saw her blank look. “The miniature packaged components of circuitry? Jackrabbit means all in a box.” Luciente was still frowning with worry.

“So you have some machines? It isn’t religious or anything?”

“Fasure we have machines.” Luciente tapped her kenner. She seemed more confident in her native air. “When you see more, you’ll like better.” Her arm around Connie gave affectionate squeezes as they walked and with her free arm she pointed, she waved, she gestured and struck postures. She talked louder and faster. “We raise chickens, ducks, pheasants, partridges, turkeys, guinea hens, geese. Goats, cows, rabbits, turtles, pigs. We of Mattapoisett are famous for our turtles and our geese. But our major proteins are plant proteins. Every region tries to be ownfed.”

“Own what?”

“Ownfed. Self‑sufficient as possible in proteins.” Luciente stopped short and clapped both hands firmly on Connie’s shoulder. “I bump around at this, but I just thought of something important. You’re right, Connie, we’re peasants. We’re all peasants.”

“Forward, into the past? Okay, it’s better to live in a green meadow than on 111th Street. But all that striving and struggling to end up in the same old bind. Stuck back home on the farm. Peons again! Back on the same old dungheap with ten chickens and a goat. That’s where my grandparents scratched out a dirt‑poor life! It depresses me.”

“Connie, wait a little, trust a little. We have great belief in our ways. Let me show you … . No!Let our doing show itself. Let people open and unfold … . Think of it this way: there was much good in the life the ancestors led here on this continent before the white man came conquering. There was much brought that was useful. It has taken a long time to put the old good with the new good into a greater good … . You’re freezing. Let’s get you a jacket. Then you must come and meet my family at lunch.”

“I’m not going to meet a bunch of strangers in this filthy bughouse dress. I’m not! Besides, I’m not hungry. Thorazine kills my appetite.”

“We can work on that later. We may be able to teach you to control the effects of the drug … . But about the clothing–come, we’ll get you some and a jacket. I’m sensitive as rock salt, as Bee and Jackrabbit both tell me. So come to my house a minute and we’ll find something.” Luciente guided her through a maze of paths and huts and small gardens where people who must be women because they carried babies on their backs were planting seeds. They hurried past a series of covered fish ponds and greenhouses, to a hut near the river where domestic and wild ducks mingled, feeding among the waterweeds. They had come nearer the hill of spidery objects, which had to be windmills turning. Again she remembered windmills on the dry plains, on ranches without electricity. The hut was built of old cement blocks eroded in soft contours and overrun with a large climbing rose just opening red sprays of crinkled leaflets. “I bred that Wait till you see it bloom! Called Diana. Big sturdy white with dark red markings and an intense musk fragrance, subzero hardy. It’s popular up in Maine and New Hampshire cause it’s so hardy for a climber. I bred back into Rugosa using Molly Maguire stock … . Oops! I barge on. Come!”

The door was unlocked and in fact had only a catch on the inside. Windows on two sides lit the room. The cherry and pine furniture was sturdy: a big desk and a big worktable and a big bed, over which a woolen coverlet was casually pulled, hanging down at a corner. The floor was wooden and on it two bright woven rugs lay with a pattern of faces peering like tropical fruit out of foliage. Drawings and kids’ paintings were tacked up here and there, as were graphs and charts, stuck on the wall somehow. Obviously Luciente liked red and gold and rich brown.

“Three of you live here?”

“Three? No. this is my space.”

“I thought you lived with two men. The Bee and Jackrabbit you’re always talking about.”

“We’re sweet friends. Some of us use the term ‘core’ for those we’re closest to. Others think that distinction is bad. We debate. Myself, I use core, cause I think it means something real. Bee, Jackrabbit, Otter are my core–”

“Another lover!”

“No, Otter’s a handfriend, not a pillowfriend. We’ve been close since we were sixteen. Politically we are very close … .”

“But if you live alone, who do they live with?”

Luciente looked mildly shocked. “We each have our own space! Only babies share space! I have indeed read that people used to live piled together.” Luciente shuddered. “Connie, you have space of your own. How could one live otherwise? How meditate, think, compose songs, sleep, study?”

“Nobody lives with their family? So what about kids? Mothers and kids must live together.”

“We live amongour family. Today you’ll meet everybody in my family and my core except Bee, who’s on defense till next month. All my other mems are around, I think … .” Luciente slid aside a door and took out pants and a shirt. “If these don’t suit, take what you like. I was told you have body taboos? I’ll wait outside while you dress.”

Alone, Connie got into the clothes quickly. Luciente was taller and a little broader in the shoulders, but Connie was broader in the hips and behind, so that at first she could not close the pants. Then she found an adjustment in the seams so that they could be tightened or loosened, lengthened or shortened. A woman would not outwear them if she gained or lost twenty pounds. Well, they’d invented one new thing in this Podunk future. After she put on the shirt, she looked around the room. By the desk a screen was set into the wall. A television? Curious, she pressed the On button.

“Good light, do you wish visual, communication, or transmission? You have forgotten to press your request button,” a woman’s voice said. When Connie went on staring at it, it eventually repeated itself exactly, and she realized it was recorded.

She pushed T for transmission, she hoped. The screen began flashing the names of articles or talks, obviously in plant genetics. As the screen flashed the meaningless titles, she read the other buttons. One said PREC, so she tried it. A description like a little book review came on and remained there for two minutes.

ATTEMPTS TO INCREASE NUTRITIONAL CONTENT IN WINTER GRAIN (TRTTICALE SIBERICA) SUITABLE SHORT SEASON NORTHERN CROPS MAINTAINING INSECT & SMUT RESISTANCE. PROMISING DIRECTION. FULL BREEDING INFO. JAMES BAY CREE, BLACK DUCK GROUP, 10 PP. 5 DC. 2 PH.

Feeling watched, she shut the set off guiltily and jumped back. Then she saw that a large, long‑haired cat the color of a peach had got up from a window ledge–a shelf built on the inside for a row of plants and perhaps the cat itself to sun on. The cat strode toward her with a purposeful air, hopped on a chair, and faced her expectantly. “Mao? Mgnao?” The cat blinked, averted its gaze, then glanced back. It repeated the gesture several times, each time more slowly, with a pause in between when it kept its amber stare fixed on her face. She felt a little scared. Did it think she was some kind of big mouse? Did it expect to be fed? Finally with a snort the cat hopped off the chair and pointedly, she could not help feeling, turned its back and flounced off to the sunny window. But it kept its ears cocked toward her.

As she opened the door, she found Luciente squatting outside in the rough grass like a peon, watching a small dark blue butterfly. She looked as if she could squat there all day. Well, what did I expect from the future, Connie asked herself. Pink skies? Robots on the march? Transistorized people? I guess we blew ourselves up and now we’re back to the dark ages to start it all over again. She stood a moment, weakened by a sadness she could not name. A better world for the children–that had always been the fantasy; that however bad things were, they might get better. But if Angelina had a child, and that child a child, this was the world they would finally be born into in five generations: how different was it really from rural Mexico with its dusty villages rubbing their behinds into the dust?

“It’s a Spring Azure,” Luciente said. “Ants milk them.”

“Do you have any children?”

“Below the age of twelve, forty‑nine in our village. We’re maintaining a steady population.”

“I mean you: have you had any children?”

“I myself? Yes, twice. Besides, I’m what they call a kidbinder, meaning I mother everybody’s kids.” Taking her arm, Luciente nudged her toward the blue dome she pointed out as a fooder. “Let’s hurry. I put in a guest slip for you, in case we got through. I’m mother to Dawn. I was also mother to Neruda, who is waiting to study shelf farming. Person will start in the fall; I’m very excited. Course, I no longer mother Neruda, not since naming. No youth wants mothering.” All this time Luciente was hustling her along the stone path toward the translucent blue dome.

Connie waited to get a word in. “So how old are your children?”

“Neruda is thirteen. Dawn is seven.”

That put Luciente at least into her thirties. “Is your lover Bee their father? Or the other one?”

“Father?” Luciente raised her wrist, but Connie stopped her.

“Dad. Papa. You know. Male parent.”

“Ah? No, not Bee or Jackrabbit. Comothers are seldom sweet friends if we can manage. So the child will not get caught in love misunderstandings.”

“Comothers?”

“My coms”–she pronounced the olong–“with Dawn are Otter and Morningstar–you’ll meet them right now.”

The room they entered took up half the dome and was filled with big tables seating perhaps fifteen at each, mostly dressed in the ordinary work clothes that Luciente wore, the children in small versions. The pants, the shirts, the occasional overalls or tunics came in almost every color she could name, many faded with washing and age, although the fabrics seemed to hold up. Everybody looked to be talking at once, yet it wasn’t noisy. The scene was livelier than institutional feeding usually made for. A child was climbing on a bench to tell a story, waving both arms. At the far end a man with a mustache was weeping openly into his soup and all about him people were patting his shoulders and making a big fuss. People were arguing heatedly, laughing and telling jokes, and a child was singing loudly at the table nearest the door. Really, this could be a dining room in a madhouse, the way people sat naked with their emotions pouring out, but there was a strong energy level here. The pulse of the room was positive but a little overwhelming. She felt buffeted. Why wasn’t it noisier? Something absorbed the sound, muted the voices shouting and babbling, the scrapes of melody and laughter, the calls, the clatter of dishes and cutlery, the scraping of chairs on the floor–made of plain old‑fashioned wood, as far as she could tell. Unless it was all some clevar imitation? She could not believe how many things they seemed to make out of wood. Some panels in the wall‑ceiling of the dome were transparent and some were translucent, although from the outside she had not seen any difference.

“No reason to look in. The fooder has to be well soundproofed, or on party nights, at festivals, nobody who didn’t want to carry on would be able to sleep. The panes with the blue edge come out. We get the breeze from the river–when it gets too hot, we take the panels out.” Luciente was heading for a table on the far side, where everyone except the littlest child stopped eating to watch them approach. “Some you can see through and some not, because some of us like to feel closed in while we eat and some–like me–want to see everything. The fooder is a home for all of us. A warm spot.”

On the translucent panels designs had been painted or baked in–she could not tell–in a wild variety of styles and levels of competence, ranging from sophisticated abstracts, landscapes, and portraits to what must be children’s drawings. “Where did the art come from?”

Luciente looked surprised. “The walls? Why, from us–or some of us. I don’t fiddle with it. I’m one of the sixty percent who can’t. We find all the arts fall out in a forty/sixty ratio in the population–doesn’t seem to matter whether you’re talking about dancing or composing or sculpting. Same curve. Me myself, I drum magnificently!”

Like a child! She could not imagine any woman of the age they must share saying in El Barrio or anyplace else she had lived, “Me myself, I drum magnificently!” Indeed, they were like children, all in unisex rompers, sitting at their long kindergarten tables eating big plates of food and making jokes. “I can see wanting to look at your own child’s drawing. But wouldn’t other people get tired of it?”

They had reached the table through a sea of spicy odors that touched her stomach to life. Two places were vacant, set with handsome heavy pottery dishes in earth colors, glass tumblers on the heavy side, and cutlery of a smooth substance that was neither silver nor stainless steel and perhaps not even metal. Someone–slender, young–leaped up and hugged Luciente, held out his?/her? arms to her, checked the gesture, and smiled a brilliant welcome. “You got through! Wait till everybody hears about this!”

“Never mind. Did you save us lunch? I’m thinning by the second,” Luciente said, hugging the youth back.

They were literally patted into their seats and she found herself cramped with nervousness. Touching and caressing, hugging and fingering, they handled each other constantly. In a way it reminded her again of her childhood, when every emotion seemed to find a physical outlet, when both love and punishment had been expressed directly on her skin.

Large platters of food passed from hand to hand: a corn‑bread of coarse‑grained meal with a custard layer and a crusty, wheaty top; butter not in a bar but a mound, pale, sweet and creamy; honey in an open pitcher, dark with a heady flavor. The soup was thick with marrow beans, carrots, pale greens she could not identify, rich in the mouth with a touch of curry. In the salad were greens only and scallions and herbs, yet it was piquant, of many leaves blended with an oil tasting of nuts and a vinegar with a taste of … sage? Good food, good in the mouth and stomach. Pleasant food.

Luciente was saying everyone’s name, leaving her battered. Nobody seemed to have more than one. “Don’t you have last names?”

“When we die?” Barbarossa, a man with blue eyes and a red beard, raised his eyebrows at her. “We give back with the name we happen to have at that time.”

“Surnames. Look, my name is Consuelo Ramos. Connie for short. Consuelo is my Christian name, my first name. Ramos is my last name. When I was born I was called Consuelo Camacho. Ramos is the name of my second husband: therefore I am Consuelo Camacho Ramos.” She left out Бlvarez, the name of her first husband, Martin, for simplicity.

They looked at each other, several adults and children consulting the kenners on their wrists. Finally Luciente said, “We have no equivalent.”

She felt blocked. “I suppose you have numbers. I guess you’re only called by first names because your real name–your identification–is the number you get at birth.”

“Why would we be numbered? We can tell each other apart.” The tall intense young person was staring at her. Jackrabbit, Luciente had said: therefore male. He had a lot of very curly light brown hair and he wore the sleeves of his pale blue work shirt rolled up to expose several bracelets of hand‑worked silver and turquoise on each wiry arm.

“But the government. How are you identified?”

“When I was born, I was named Peony by my mothers–”

“Peony sounds like a girl’s name.”

“I don’t understand. It was the name chosen for me. When I came to naming, I took my own name. Never mind what that was. But when Luciente brought me down to earth after my highflying, I became Jackrabbit. You see. For my long legs and my big hunger and my big penis and my jumps through the grass of our common life. When Luciente and Bee have quite reformed me, I will change my name again, to Cat in the Sun.” He produced on his thin face a perfect imitation of Luciente’s orange cat squeezing its eyes shut. “But why have two names at one time? In our village we have only one Jackrabbit. When I visit someplace else, I’m Jackrabbit of Mattapoisett.”

“You change your name any time you want to?”

“If you do it too often, nobody remembers your name,” Barbarossa said solemnly in his schoolmaster’s manner. “Sometimes youths do that the first years after naming.”

The old brown‑skinned … woman?–it confused Connie to be so unsure–introduced as Sojourner was giggling. “They’re always trying out fancy new labels every week till no one can call them anything but Hey you or Friend. It slows down by and by.”

“All right–you have those things on your wrist. Somewhere there’s a big computer. How does it recognize you?”

“My own memory annex is in my kenner,” Luciente said. “With transport of encyclopedia, you just call for what you want.”

“But what about the police? What about the government? How do they keep track of you if you keep changing names?”

Again a great buzz of confusion and kenner checking passed around the table, with half of them turning to each other instead.

“This is complicated!” The old woman Sojourner shook her head. “Government I think I grasp. Luciente can show you government, but nobody’s working there today.”

“Maybe next time. I will try to study up on this, but it’s very difficult,” Luciente moaned.

“We should all study to help Luci,” a child said.

“In the meantime, maybe you could ask something easier? You said something about the paintings?”

“It doesn’t matter. I just thought it was funny you put up the kids’ stuff. I mean everybody wants to look at their own kid’s pictures, but nobody wants to look at anybody else’s.”

A slight blond man, Morningstar, peered into her face with puzzlement. “But they’re all ours.”

“We change the panels all the time,” Jackrabbit said. “For instance, say I make one and later it stales on me. I make a new one. Or if everybody tires of one, we discuss and change. I did that whole big river namelon on the east, cause people wanted.”

Luciente put down her fork. “What’s wrong, Connie?”

“Connie’s worn out,” Jackrabbit said. “Strangers, every lug asking questions, holding the contact. You imagine there’s no energy drain in catching.”

Luciente put an arm around her. “You look gutted. Remember this food will not sustain.”

“Why not?” She felt thick with fatigue and the room swayed. “I can taste it.”

“As in dreams. You experience throughme … . We better go back.”

“Finish your lunch first.” The voices seemed to drift around her and her eyelids drooped.

“This exhaustion worries me. I must teach you exercises–”

“Not here. Can’t think. Too many people.”

“Come! Give me your arm. We’ll visit again. This is only a false spring, a January thaw of beginning. Back you go.”

She felt leaden, her feet wading through loose sand. As they shuffled out, Luciente looked worried. Standing at last on the stone walk, Connie mumbled, “Clothing. Must change.”

“Your body is where it was, unchanged in dress. Understand, you are not really here. If I was knocked on the head and fell unconscious, say into full nevel, you’d be back in your time instantly … .” Luciente drew her into the firm embrace with their foreheads touching. She was too spent to do more than fall into Luciente’s concentration as into a fast stream, the waters churning her under. She came to propped against the wall of the seclusion room. The tears had dried on the sleeve of her faded dress. She lay down at once on the bare, piss‑stained mattress and fell asleep.

FOUR

Spring in the violent ward was only more winter, except for a little teasing of the eyeballs when she stood at the high, heavily barred window. The radiators still pumped blasts of heat into the air that the smell of disinfectant and stale bodies turned into a foul broth. Pain and terror colored the air of Ward L‑6. Pain silvered the air; when she was lurching into drugged sleep, pain sloshed over from the other beds. Yet spring finally came to Ward L one April Wednesday.

She was sitting near the station, hoping to do some little job to cadge cigarettes. As one of the functional patients, she got on with the attendants, except for an evil redheaded racist bitch on weekends, and with one of them, Ms. Fargo, she got on well. Ms. Fargo was close to her in color and size and age, but black and free–as free as any woman making that kind of wage with six kids at home could be called free.