Woman On The Edge Of Time (52 page)

Finally she felt a brush of presence, hard, hard and heavy. Yet she could tell almost at once that this time the pain was coming from Luciente. No, the pain was from the terrible effort. Luciente too strained toward her. Together at last they forced weak contact.

“I feared you were dead,” she thought at Luciente.

“I feared they had done something … final to you. Tried … many times!”

“Bring me over!”

Luciente tried for a long time. “Very hard … need help. A moment. I’ll call Diana or Parra or Zuli … . Wait!”

Finally, roughly, she stood shaking in the meetinghouse. As on the nights of the feast and of Jackrabbit’s wake, many people circulated, but dressed now in ordinary clothes. Their voices were subdued.

Luciente hugged her tight. “How long! We missed you running hard. To reach you has been … like trying to walk through walls!”

“Yourself? How did you get out of the burning floater?”

“What?”

“At the front. With Hawk.”

Luciente peered into her face. “I don’t comprend. Hawk’s over there.” She pointed. “What stew is this of floaters and fronts?”

“We weren’t together at the front? Fighting?”

“Not in my life, Connie. Not in this continuum … . With that device in your brain, maybe you visioned it. You’ve been redded for visioning over the last months, grasp, from all this going over.”

“Pues … never mind. It felt so real … . How are you, Luciente?”

“I feel in you some large resolve. You plan some action?”

“I don’t want to talk about it, please. Just tell me about yourself. Bee. Dawn. How you are.”

“The Shaping controversy builds. I think we’ll call a grandcil this March to decide it. I’ve been arguing myself empty. It’s one choice to breed carrots for our uses—especially leaving wild and variant gene pools intact. Is another to breed ourselves for some uses or imagined uses! For all we know, a new ice age comes and we might better breed for furriness than
mathematical ability! I speechify! Pass it.” Luciente hugged her again. “I feared never to see you. Hard bringing you over. We’re fading contact.”

“How is Bee?”

“Look!” Luciente pointed. “Bee is explaining about agribusiness, cash crops, and hunger.”

“He’s teaching a class?”

“A memorial. Tonight.” Luciente waved at the booths, the tables, the holies and exhibits. “It’s winter games … . Traveling spectaclers are visiting us this week. We all played roles. Divvied into rich and poor, owners and colonies. For two days all us who got poor by lot fasted and had only half rations two other days. The rich ate till they were stuffed and threw the rest in the compost. I know in history they didn’t, Connie blossom, but it’s not right to destroy, we just can’t do it. We’ve been feeling a class society where most labor, others control, and some enjoy. We had prisons, police, spies, armies, torture, bosses, hunger—oh, it’s been fascinating. Now we’re discussing to know better before they go on.”

“Is this a feast?” She stared at the people wandering through the room and out into the square, stopping to examine objects laid out, watching holies, arguing over graphs and exhibits.

“No, no, a memorial. Nothing to celebrate, fasure. In winter we make time for studying, communing. Often villages send out a traveling group who go around till they get worn with being on the road … . We’ve been chewing on—Bee, Otter, White Oak, me—going around with a skit on Shaping. This troupe is from Garibaldi on Mystic, where they make pasta, computer poppers, and breed grapevines. A beautiful place, Otter says. When person was eighteen, stayed a month during harvest working and coupling with Vittorio, who’s with the troupe. Otter is crazy with pleasure to see per again … .” They were strolling among the booths, hand in hand. Bee was using a very small holi projector which produced one moment a box of a children’s breakfast cereal from her own time called Sweetee Pyes and the next an image of braceros picking lettuce. He looked at once so serious, frowning at the Sweetee Pyes and rumbling deep in his chest, and at the same time so fine, with the delicate tattoo of the bee rippling on his arm, she lost track of what Luciente was telling her.

Hawk came dodging toward them. She greeted Connie and then burst out, “Luciente! I’ve fixed. It’s time to travel. I’m going on with this troupe. Bolt’s coming with me.”

Luciente put her hands on Hawk’s slight shoulders. “Do they agree?”

Hawk quivered with excitement. “They say we can learn the parts of two people who want to go home. I’ll learn Italian and get to see villages, and when I find one that warms me, I’ll stay on and work.”

“When do you go?”

“Thursday morning. Tomorrow they’re doing an opera. They say I sing well enough for the chorus, if I start working on the music.”

Connie remembered Hawk setting out for her week in the woods. “How are you going to travel?”

“By dipper. Then, when we’re further south, by bike.”

“Do you own a bike?”

“Own? Like I dropped a rock on my own foot?”

“A bike that’s yours.”

Hawk scratched her ear. “Any bike not in use, I can use. Tomorrow I’ll say goodbye to everybody!” Hawk stood on one foot. “You think Bee would like my painting of per? It’s not … top good, but it has a lot of colors in it.”

“How not?” Luciente kissed her cheek. “If person should be so blind as not to want it, I want it.”

“I’m in velvet we’re done with taboo so I can say goodbye properly to my mothers … . Don’t tell Bee I’m going—I want to tell myself, hold?”

“Hold” Luciente shook her hand and Hawk skipped off.

“I love winter,” Luciente said as they strolled on. “Eating and getting fat and going tobogganing and ice skimming. Talking and talking and talking. I’m redding Chinese, sweetness, fifteen hours a week till even Bee picks up from hearing it so much. Also our base, we’re monitoring last year’s results from all over. And I play in a new mojai group every Friday night, last Friday we went on almost till morning. Mojai is music like this … .” Luciente began beating out a complicated rhythm over rhythm with two hands on the edge of a table.

“Shh, Luciente!” Morningstar rebuked her. “We’re listening.”

“I blather.” Luciente drew Connie away. “Such hardness in your mind tonight makes me babble more than usual. I fear for you.”

“But it was you, your people, who taught me I’m fighting a war.”

“Then fight well, Connie!” They walked out into the cold clean brisk air. Luciente paused to grab a jacket and drape it over Connie’s shoulders. Big disks of snow came tilting and turning down where already several inches lay thick, rounding all corners and softening straight lines, an expanse of white across the square marked only by the tracks of children playing.

Luciente touched her shoulder. “You want to ask if I still mourn … .”

“I wouldn’t ask!”

“I know. But you want to feel how I am. Yes, I mourn. But I work too. It hurts, but I can’t let the pain bind me … . Diana has helped. Otter has helped. Bee has carried me! … I want no new lover and I dread spring … . But look!” Luciente waved her hand at a snowball battle swirling around the statue of a funny bird dancing on one foot and a barricade of benches. Briefly Dawn ran through a pool of light, whooping and waving.

Lazy flakes drifted onto the arm of the borrowed jacket. “Luciente, do you think it’s always wrong to kill?”

“We live by eating living beings, whether vegetable or animal. Without chlorophyll in our skins, we have no choice.” Luciente caught flakes on her outstretched palm.

“I mean to kill a person.”

“How can I face something so abstract?”

“To kill someone with power over me. Who means to do me in.”

“Power
is
violence. When did it get destroyed peacefully? We all fight when we’re back to the wall—or to tear down a wall. You know we kill people who choose twice to hurt others. We don’t think it’s right to kill them. Only convenient. Nobody wants to stand guard over another.”

“In my time people are willing to stand guard. It’s a living. I guess maybe it’s power, too.”

“You brood on killing someone, my friend?”

She nodded, disentangling herself from Luciente to clutch her hands together before her breasts. She felt pride and shame wash through her. Mala, the woman who acted. To thrust herself forward into the world. Luciente was speaking, but under the rush of her blood, the words mumbled like stones in the bed of a river. Slowly people drifted from the meetinghouse and began taking shovels, brooms from sheds along the square and the paths. The shovels clanged against the stone, the wood scraped. The night began to fill with laughter and the sounds of shoveling. The children stopped their fight and began to clear the snow. In red pants and a dark blue parka, Dawn was wielding a broom, coming along behind Otter, whose broad single braid bounced rhythmically on her back. Bee was clearing snow from the path toward the fooder, as Hawk came running and sliding to work beside him. Her breath came out in white plumes as she talked and talked full speed to him.

She could hear Luciente speaking but she could no longer distinguish the words in the roar of her blood. Only dimly she could hear the scrape of metal on stone. Lips moved as if people were singing. Dawn looked over her padded shoulder at them. Dawn smiled and waved and began to sweep very hard with the broom, showing off, casting up a fine white dust. Flakes rested lightly on her black dome of hair, the hood of the parka cast back. One flake sat for a moment on the end of her delicate, sensuously curved nose, snow on her beautiful Mayan nose where Connie imagined that she pressed a quick kiss.

She lay flat on her bed, out of breath as if she had been dropped from a height.

“What is it?” Tina sat up, awake. “You okay?”

“Yes …”

“You cried out. What happened—you have a bad dream?”

“A good one. Tina, I dreamed of my daughter, safe, happy, in another place.” She could still see Angelina’s face ruddy with playing, her small arms fat in the parka feverishly wielding the broom, while the snowflake melted on her nose. “If only they had left me something!” she whispered. Still trembling, she thought, If only they had left me Martin, or Claud, or Angelina, if they had even left me Dolly and Nita, I would have minded my own business. I’d have bowed my head and kept down. I
was not born and raised to fight battles, but to be modest and gentle and still. Only one person to love. Just one little corner of loving of my own. For that love I’d have borne it all and I’d never have fought back. I would have obeyed. I would have agreed that I’m sick, that I’m sick to be poor and sick to be sick and sick to be hungry and sick to be lonely and sick to be robbed and used. But you were so greedy, so cruel! One of them, just one, you could have left me! But I have nothing. Why shouldn’t I strike back?

Yet her hands shook with fear. She lay cold and trembling, all the night.

“This operation is designed to help you,” Dr. Morgan said. “To enable us to return you to society. You’ll be able to hold a job.”

“I feel a lot better. Why do I need this operation now? I went home to my brother’s Thanksgiving. I worked real hard there. I’ve been good and cooperative on the ward.”

“You’ve been better before, Connie,” Acker said. Today Miss Moynihan was not sitting at his side but across the room next to her boss, Dr. Morgan. She and Acker did not catch each other’s gaze. Her gray eyes were bloodshot and underscored by dark tissue. She had been crying; she had not been sleeping. Patty passed her a note and she shook her head bitterly, drawing herself tighter. Acker seemed more nervous than usual. He had a dark area on his left cheek, like a bruise. Who had hit him? Miss Moynihan or one of her brothers? “We know that you can’t help what you do. It’s as though you experienced a shorting out of circuits that causes you to move into an episode of uncontrollable rage.”

“I haven’t done anything wrong in months. I’m much better. Why do I need this operation right now, when I’m doing fine?”

“You’ve had periods of calm before,” Dr. Redding pointed out. His fingers were propped together like steeples over his empty cup. “Long periods. But they always end the same way. Don’t they, Connie?”

“It isn’t the same. Really, please, it isn’t! Look, I did something I’m ashamed for, my daughter. But I’ve paid for that again and again! Forever. How can I be uncontrollable? You been controlling me.”

“You don’t want to hurt someone close to you again, do you, Connie? You have a recurrent disease, like someone who has a recurrent malaria,” Acker said, looking pleased with himself. He glanced at Dr. Redding for approval, but Redding was talking in Dr. Argent’s ear. Both of diem had been turning over the pages of a proposal of some sort, and Argent was going down the budget line by line, making little notes to the side.

“But maybe the other thing worked. Maybe I don’t need an operation!”

“We have a permission from the brother, don’t we?” Redding asked Patty.

She made a little sitting curtsy toward a file on the table. “Yes, Doctor.”

Dr. Argent put down the proposal, took the pipe from his mouth, and fixed Connie with a twinkly smile. “Mrs. Ramos, you’re frightened by the idea of an operation. Isn’t that right?”

“Sure, I’m afraid! I’m okay now, Doctor. Look at the ward notes.”

“Your mother died after an operation. Didn’t she, Mrs. Ramos?”

Ay de mí, he was playing a psychiatrist game. She would have to say yes. “Doctor, can I get myself a cup of coffee, please? I feel a little confused, a little sleepy. I didn’t sleep so well last night on account of worrying about this.” She stood up, but remained balanced over her chair. “Please, Doctor, can I get myself a cup of coffee?”

Argent raised a silvery eyebrow, his interest fading. “You’ve often been a little confused, haven’t you, Mrs. Ramos?” He picked up the proposal again, reaching for his pen.

“You can have your coffee as you leave. We’re almost done with you,” Dr. Redding said, stretching his long legs under the table. “We can all use a coffee break. This is the last of them, isn’t it?”

“Yes, Doctor,” Patty said, consulting her calendar.

“Connie, we understand that you’re frightened. Society is also afraid of you—with more reason, wouldn’t you say? This operation is less complicated than the one you underwent in October. Now, you agreed you’re better for that operation.” Redding spoke fast, the words speeding into her. “You’ll be
the better for this surgical procedure also. Then, like Alice, you’ll be released. Surely you don’t want to spend your life in a mental institution?”