The Mountain Cage (28 page)

“There’s something about you. I can’t figure you out.”

“Don’t try.” I kept my voice steady. “You wouldn’t want me to complain to your boss, would you? He might not hire you again. Escorts have to be trusted.”

He was very quiet. I couldn’t see his dark face clearly in the fading light, but I could sense that he was weighing the worth of a confrontation with me against the chance of losing his job. My face was hot, my mouth dry. I had spent too much time with him, given him too many chances to notice subtly wrong gestures. I continued to stare directly at him, wondering if his greed would win out over practicality.

“Okay,” he said at last, and opened the door.

I was charged more than I had expected to pay, but did not argue about the fee. I pressed a few coins on Ellis; he took them while refusing to look at me. He knows, I thought then; he knows and he’s letting me go. But I might have imagined that, seeing kindness where there was none.

I took a roundabout route back to Sam’s, checking to make sure no one had followed me, then pulled off the road to change the car’s license plate, concealing my own under my shirt.

Sam’s store stood at the end of the road, near the foot of my mountain. Near the store, a small log cabin had been built. I had staked my claim to most of the mountain, buying up the land to make sure it remained undeveloped, but the outside world was already moving closer.

Sam was sitting behind the counter, drumming his fingers as music blared. I cleared my throat and said hello.

“Joe?” His watery blue eyes squinted. “You’re late, boy.”

“Had to get your car fixed. Don’t worry—I paid for it already. Thanks for letting me rent it again.” I counted out my coins and pressed them into his dry, leathery hand.

“Any time, son.” The old man held up the coins, peering at each one with his weak eyes. “Don’t look like you’ll get home tonight. You can use the sofa there—I’ll get you a nightshirt.”

“I’ll sleep in my clothes.” I gave him an extra coin.

He locked up, hobbled toward his bedroom door, then turned. “Get into town at all?”

“No.” I paused. “Tell me something, Sam. You’re old enough to remember. What was it really like before?” I had never asked him in all the years I had known him, avoiding intimacy of any kind, but suddenly I wanted to know.

“I’ll tell you, Joe.” He leaned against the doorway. “It wasn’t all that different. A little softer around the edges, maybe, quieter, not as mean, but it wasn’t all that different. Men always ran everything. Some say they didn’t, but they had all the real power—sometimes they’d dole a little of it out to the girls, that’s all. Now we don’t have to anymore.”

I had been climbing up the mountain for most of the morning, and had left the trail, arriving at my decoy house before noon. Even Sam believed that the cabin in the clearing was my dwelling. I tried the door, saw that it was still locked, then continued on my way.

My home was farther up the slope, just out of sight of the cabin. I approached my front door, which was almost invisible near the ground; the rest of the house was concealed under slabs of rock and piles of deadwood. I stood still, letting a hidden camera lens get a good look at me. The door swung open.

“Thank God you’re back,” Julia said as she pulled me inside and closed the door. “I was so worried. I thought you’d been caught and they were coming for me.”

“It’s all right. I had some trouble with Sam’s car, that’s all.”

She looked up at me; the lines around her mouth deepened. “I wish you wouldn’t go.” I took off the pack loaded with the tools and supplies unavailable at Sam’s store. Julia glanced at the pack resentfully. “It isn’t worth it.”

“You’re probably right.” I was about to tell her of my own trip into town, but decided to wait until later.

We went into the kitchen. Her hips were wide under her pants; her large breasts bounced as she walked. Her face was still pretty, even after all the years of hiding, her lashes thick and curly, her mouth delicate. Julia could not travel in the world as it was; no clothing, no disguise, could hide her.

I took off my jacket and sat down, taking out my card, and my papers. My father had given them to me—the false name, the misleading address, the identification of a male—after I had pleaded for my own life. He had built my hideaway; he had risked everything for me. “Give the world a choice,” he had said, “and women will be the minority, maybe even die out completely; perhaps we can only love those like ourselves.” He had looked hard as he said it, and then he had patted me on the head, sighing as though he regretted the choice. Maybe he had. He had chosen to have a daughter, after all.

I remembered his words. “Who knows?” he had asked. “What is it that made us two kinds who have to work together to get the next batch going? Oh, I know about evolution, but it didn’t have to be that way, or any way. It’s curious.”

“It can’t last,” Julia said, and I did not know if she meant the world, or our escape from the world.

There would be no Eves in their Eden, I thought. The visit to town had brought it all home to me. We all die, but we go with a conviction about the future; my extinction would not be merely personal. Only traces of the feminine would linger—an occasional expression, a posture, a feeling—in the flat-breasted male form. Love would express itself in fruitless unions, divorced from reproduction; human affections are flexible.

I sat in my home, in my prison, treasuring the small freedom I had, the gift of a man, as it seemed such freedom had always been for those like me, and wondered again if it could have been otherwise.

Afterword to “Fears”:

“Fears” is a story that, as I’ve discovered over the years, seems to lend itself to being read aloud. This may be partly because it isn’t a long story; in an age when attention spans are growing ever shorter, doing a long story at a reading risks putting what audience still remains at the reading’s conclusion to sleep. But I think its modest success at readings is largely because the story is written in first person, which means that the author has only to impersonate the narrator. Writers with great dramatic gifts can get away with reading a story that requires many voices, but for those of us with less skill and less confidence in our abilities, first-person narratives are safer.

Some writers are uncomfortable doing readings, or refuse to do them at all. Others like to read work in progress, which seems to me a dangerous undertaking, but then I’m one of those writers who doesn’t like to show my work to anyone until I have a final draft, or close to it, and even then I pick my target readers carefully. Showing a story or part of a novel to the editor you’re working with, or to another writer whose judgment you trust, makes much more sense to me than seeing how an audience of people you don’t know might react to a piece of writing that is still in the fragile state of being in progress and unfinished. The feedback can throw you off; you have to be able to hear your own voice clearly before you can expect others to hear it.

“Fears” may also go over well in readings because the world it depicts is not an unfamiliar one. Something like it is certainly a possibility, given the increasing control we are acquiring over human reproduction. In fact, I’ve often had the feeling that we’re already living in this world to some degree. Some years ago, after a reading, someone asked me what especially had inspired this particular story. “Super Bowl Sunday,” I told her, “because during that weekend, we might as well be living in an all-male society,” and I think she believed me.

THE NOVELLA RACE

Anyone who wants to be a contender has to start training at an early age. Because competitions are always in Standard, my parents insisted that I speak Standard instead of our local dialect. I couldn’t use an autocompositor. We never owned a dictator either. “You’ll only have a typewriter during the race,” my mother would say. “You’d better get used to it now.”

I had few friends as a child. You can’t have friends while training in writing, or any other sport for that matter. The other kids plugged in, swallowed RNA doses, or were hypnotized in order to learn the skills they would need as adults. I had to master the difficult arts of reading and writing. At times I hated my typewriter, the endless sentence-long exercises, and the juvenile competitions. I envied other kids and wished that I too could romp carelessly through life.

Some people think being an athlete keeps you in shape. Everyone
should
take a few minutes each day to sit down and think. But competitive sports usually damage the body and torment the mind. A champion is almost always distorted in some way.

As I grew older, I noticed that others simply marked time. They were good spectators, consumers, and socializers, but they went to their graves without attempting anything extraordinary. I wanted a gold medal, honor, and fame. Even when I wanted to quit, I knew I’d gone too far to turn back.

By the time I was sixteen I knew I was neither a sprinter nor a distance runner. My short stories were incomplete and I did not have the endurance for the novel competition. Poetry was beyond me, although my grandmother had taken a bronze medal in the poetry race of 2024. I would have to train in the novella.

My parents wanted me to train with Phaedon Karath, who had won four Olympic gold medals before turning professional, thus disqualifying himself from further competition. Karath was hard on his trainees, but they did well in contests. I would have preferred going to Lalia Grasso, whose students were devoted to her. But those accustomed to her gentle ways often messed up during races; they did not develop the necessary streak of cruelty nor the essential quality of egotism.

Everyone knew about Eli Shankquist, her most talented trainee and a three-time PanAmerican gold medalist as well. During the Olympic race, the only one that matters, he became involved with the notoriously insecure Maliah Senbok. Touched by her misery, he spent a lot of time encouraging her. And what did he get? He didn’t finish his own novella and Senbok took a bronze. A lot of spectators sympathized with Shankquist, but most writers thought he was a fool.

None of Karath’s students would have been in such a fix. So I sent off my file of fiction and waited long months for an answer. Just before my seventeenth birthday, a reply arrived on the telex. Karath wanted a personal interview. I left on the shuttle the next day.

Karath lived in a large villa overlooking the Adriatic. As I entered, I looked around the hallway. Several green beanbag chairs stood next to heavy Victorian tables covered with illuminated manuscripts. Colorful tapestries depicting minstrels and scribes hung on the walls. The servo, a friendly silver ball with cylindrical limbs, ushered me to the study.

The study was clean and Spartan. To my right, a computer console stood next to the wall. To the left, a large window overlooked the blue sea. Karath sat at his glass-topped desk, typing. He looked up and motioned to a straight-backed wood chair. I sat down.

As I fidgeted, he got up and paced to the window. I had seen him on the screen a few times but in person he seemed shorter. He was wiry, with thick dark hair and a small, hard face. He looked, I thought apprehensively, like a young tough, in spite of his age. I waited, trying to picture myself in this house, typing away, making friends, workshopping stories, getting drunk, having an affair and doing all the things a writer does.

Karath turned and paced to the desk. As he picked up a folder, which I recognized as my file, he muttered, “You’re Alena Dorenmatté.”

I tried to smile. “That’s me.”

“What makes you think you belong here?”

“I want the best training in the novella I can get.”

“That’s a crock of shit. You want to fuck and get drunk and sit around thinking artistic thoughts and congratulating yourself on your sensitivity. You won’t sweat blood over a typewriter. You want to be coddled.”

He threw my file across the desk. It landed on the floor with a
plop
. I picked it up, clutching it to my chest.

“Let me fill you in, Dorenmatté. There’s nothing but cow pies in that file. Understand? I don’t think you could win a local.”

“I won a local last year, I placed first in the BosWash.” He couldn’t have reviewed my citations very carefully. “Why’d you ask me here anyway? You could have insulted me over the relay.”

“Maybe the truth wouldn’t sink in over the relay. I like to say what I think face to face. You’re not a writer. Your stories are nothing but clichés and adolescent tragedy. You can’t plot and you can’t create characters. You have nothing to say. You’d make a fool of yourself in Olympic competition. Cow pies, that’s what you write. Go home and learn how to socialize so you don’t ruin your life.”

My face was burning. “I don’t know why anybody trains with you. If the other trainers were that mean, no one would ever write again.”

He flew at me, seized the file, and tore it in half, scattering papers over the floor. Terrified, I shrank back.

“Let me tell you something, Dorenmatté. A writer doesn’t give up. He takes punishment, listens to criticism, and keeps writing. If he doesn’t make it, it’s because he wasn’t any good. I don’t run a nursery, I train writers. Now get out of here. I have work to do.”